Do you envy the kids, just a little bit, as they load up on school supplies, dress up in new clothes and walk to the corner to meet the school bus?     Maybe not the school bus part of the proposition. At least for me.     My first day on the school bus, which coincided with my first day at a new and distant all-girls’ high school, ranks as one of my life’s traumas in a minor key. Those were the days before backpacks, and we carried our books in our...

We love our dogs. Forty-six million of us share our homes with 78 million dogs. So when the constellation Sirius brings us the Dog Days of summer, Bay Weekly goes to the dogs to pander to that audience.     Chuck or Chester; Cheyenne or Cassie; Mack, Magic, Max or Moe; Nipper or Norman; Roscoe or Rusty; Winston or Whiskey; Brandy or Bourbon; Brown Dog or Bruno; Poncho, Polly, Peaches or Peanuts; Sandy or Sophie; Sugar or Scamp; Snuffy or Sparky; Dexter, Tucker, Cooper or Caper....

On Sundays, my husband — a lifelong print newspaperman — can imagine himself happy in a world of paperless newspapers. That’s because I’ve never managed the skill of neatly refolding a read newspaper.     “How can a tidy person like you throw your newspapers on the floor in a heap?” he asks. Husband Bill is not tidy by my standards, except in his management of perused newsprint. Even so, he does not live up to his tidy father’s standards...

Fishing for compliments was one of my mother’s seven deadly sins, and she passed along her aversion. So I cast a fishy eye at all the liking social media specialists urge on us. I’m not much more comfortable at events — from Major League Baseball to business booster meetings —where you’re told who to clap for, when and how loud.     In my book, as in my mother’s, applause wants to rise spontaneously.     When I feel like...