Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.

Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.

For most baseball fans, maybe oldest is always best. We love baseball because it seizes and retains the past, like the snowy village inside a glass paperweight.

When we put words together - adjective with noun, noun with verb, verb with object - we start to talk to each other.

If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.

Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.

Each year the big garden grew smaller and Jane - who grew flowers by choice, not corn or stringbeans - worked at the vegetables more than I did. Each winter I dreamed crops, dreamed marvels of canning . . . and each summer I largely failed. Shamefaced, I planted no garden at all.