Reason with a View

  Quick bit of background, and then I'll get out of the way: I have celiac disease. That means my body treats gluten — the protein in wheat, barley, and rye — like an enemy, and the only treatment is not eating it. That's the short version, and it's the only medical part of this post, because this post is really about cake. Here's the whole recipe, and I use the word "recipe" loosely: 1. Get a box of King Arthur Gluten-Free Chocolate Cake Mix and make it exactly like the box says. 2. Let it cool. 3. Warm up some Nutella with a little butter until it pours easy. 4. Drizzle it over the cake and spread it around even. 5. Cut it. Eat it. Try to save some for tomorrow. That's it. No special equipment, no seventeen steps, no ingredients you have to order from a specialty store in another time zone. And here's the part that matters to me: people who do not have celiac love this cake. Nobody takes a bite and says "this tastes gluten-free." They jus...

All this week at 8 PM, I'm counting down the most haunted places in the country I call home. Not Salem. Not Gettysburg. The ground I actually live and work on — the Fredericksburg region, where I live, and the counties my work takes me through: Caroline, Essex, and Westmoreland. Three hundred years of history leaves marks, and some of those marks, people swear, still walk around. We start close to home, with the gentlest ghost on the list. Kenmore, on Washington Avenue in Fredericksburg, was built in 1752 for Fielding Lewis and his wife Betty — George Washington's sister. It is a beautiful house, and in its day it was a showplace. But Fielding Lewis spent the Revolution spending. He built a gunnery that turned out weapons for the Continental Army, outfitted ships, and poured his own fortune into the cause, expecting to be paid back. He died in 1781 still waiting on that money, with the estate strained and the worry of it on him to the end. Here's the thing: by every acco...

Everybody can do the voice. You know the one. Down low in the throat, half mad scientist, half Boris Karloff: "I was working in the lab, late one night..." Say it at any Halloween party in America and three people will answer you before you reach the end of the line. The song is only three minutes long, and more than sixty years after it was recorded, it still shows up every October like it pays rent. Here's the part I love: the man singing it wasn't really a singer. He was an actor who could do a voice. Bobby Pickett wanted to be in movies. By day he went to auditions in Los Angeles; by night he sang with a band called the Cordials to pay the bills. One night, doing the Diamonds' "Little Darlin'," he delivered the little spoken monologue in the middle in his Karloff impression — the voice of Frankenstein's monster himself. The crowd went nuts for it. His bandmate Lenny Capizzi took him aside and told him the truth: forget the rest of the act, Bo...

Here's something I keep coming back to: mentorships might matter more right now than they ever have. Not because the world got more complicated — though it did — but because of how we spend our time. We used to just... be around people. The older guy at work who'd pull you aside. The neighbor. The coach. Nobody called it mentorship. Nobody signed up for a program or filled out a matching survey. It happened because you were in the room with people who'd been where you're going. Now so much of our time is behind a screen, and those circles got thin. We've got hundreds of connections and nobody close enough to tell us when we're drifting. I hate to put it that bluntly, but there it is. A mentor isn't a life coach with a certificate. It's someone you can talk to — and who can talk to you. Someone who's been down the road and will tell you the truth, including the parts you don't want to hear. I got lucky. When I came into the affordable hous...

When I wrote my fall sky guide a couple of weeks ago — Look Up: Virginia's Night Sky Between Now and New Year's — I gave this moon exactly one line: "Big, bright, hard to miss." It deserves better than one line. So here it is, getting a post of its own. The show is Sunday evening. The Hunter's Moon reaches its peak at 12:12 a.m. on Monday, October 26 — but you don't have to be awake at 12:12 to see it, and you don't need a telescope. The moment that matters is Sunday evening, right around sunset, a little after six here in Virginia. Face east. The moon will come up over the horizon already looking full, and low in the sky it does the two things that make people pull the car over: it turns orange, and it looks enormous. The orange is the air itself. Low on the horizon, you're looking at moonlight through the thickest part of the atmosphere, and the blue gets scattered out of it before it ever reaches you. The enormous is your own brain. Put the mo...

Every person I have ever met has a sense of justice. Every single one. Now, we don’t apply it consistently, and we sure don’t apply it evenly. In our fallen state, we can be pretty relaxed about the justice other people receive. But God forbid we’re the one who gets wronged. Then we want justice for every injury done to us, every slight, every wrong — and we want it down to the last penny. Watch how fast it wakes up when it’s ours. Nobody taught us that. We never argue about whether justice exists. We only argue about whether this thing or that thing was unjust. The standard itself, nobody really questions. C.S. Lewis noticed the same thing. He wrote that "human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way." We know the rule. We break the rule. I know that in myself as much as anybody. Here’s the part I can’t get past: I don’t think that...