The Write Stuff

I read a lot. Probably too much. It is keeping me from my household chores, like taking out the garbage. (Hmm, maybe I should read even more.) Magazine-wise, I get the New Yorker, People, the Week, Vanity Fair, Florida Sportsman (it has great pictures of fish I can’t seem to catch), Golf Digest (another magazine that highlights my inadequacies), and one or two others that I don’t recall ordering. I also get The New York Times , because I used to work there, and because in my ultra-conservative neighborhood in Florida I like to piss people off. (I must remember to tip the delivery guy at Christmas; my home must be his only local stop!) I also read books in print. Some suggestions: Where the Crawdads Sing  by Delia Owens;  The Splendid and the Vile  by Erik Larson; Black Smoke , by Adrian Miller (which has a great recipe for “Old Arthur’s Pork Belly Burnt Ends”; The Martian and Project Hail Mary , by Andy Weir. The last two, by Weir, are of course science-fiction. But th

A young Marine P.F.C. on a Navy plane flying to Guantanamo in 1968 chatted with a fellow jarhead sitting next to him. They struck up a friendship, which continued at the base. Some months later, the Marine’s “new friend” was mysteriously shipped stateside well in advance of the normal one-year tour. Soon after that, the P.F.C. was sleeping in his top bunk when he smelled smoke and discovered that his mattress was on fire! The man in the bottom bunk had inserted a lit cigarette in the mattress above. It was a “fragging” incident without the grenade. Although possibly meant as a warning, the Marine couldn’t be sure, so he confronted the man with the cigarette and found out that the “new friend” he’d met on the plane was a Criminal Investigative Department agent, sent to Guantanamo to uncover drug use. The C.I.D. man had asked one too many questions and had been found out. He was quickly sent home for his own safety. Unfortunately, it was assumed that the young P.F.C. had helped in the C.