It’s late August. Seemingly without ample warning, the days are getting shorter. It’s still summer warm – and occasionally summer hot – but the underlying beat is changing.

The curiosities of human nature never seem to disappoint.  

The slightest moment can be a trigger. Something unexpected appears and brings back a memory or creates a small explosion of insight.

This past weekend was not a detective show. So its events were either a coincidence … or a “cosmic intersection of realities.” Take your pick.

One can recall that time, seemingly eons ago, when Walter Cronkhite would calmly and directly report what had happened during the day. There were no histrionics, no inflammatory sound bites, no table pounding in those reports: just the news.

It’s always interesting to run into a word or phrase that’s novel. It’s the “what does that mean?” syndrome.

Sitting on the shoulder of Dickens’s title character were not angels and devils, but a talking raven, Grip. Throughout the book, it is Grip who delivers the punch lines, the insights, and the wisdom that somehow escape young Barnaby who is clearly not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Ah, February. The month of love. Flowers and candy and jewelry sales hoping to boost engagement proposals.

You may have noticed. The proliferation of so-called “celebrity biopics” continues both in a movie theater near you or, more conveniently, on a streaming service inviting your homebound blitzing evenings and weekends. When, a few years ago, Timothée Chalamet emerged as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, theaters were filled and song downloads of “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” skyrocketed. The Nobel Prize-winning poet moved into the spotlight once again, decades after Robert Zimmerman emerged from Hibbing, MN, and became Bob Dylan.

JUNE RECIPE