The morning was perfect, beyond any expectation. We went to the orchid show, and we were in a pink-cloud honeymoon that neither of us expected but we both felt intensely for an hour and a half.

With all the ruin emanating from the Oval Office on a daily basis, it’s easy to fall into quiet despair. Following the news feels like monitoring a malignant tumor as it spreads outward from the epicenter of the free world, jumping oceans, URLs, and psyches, threatening the globe on macro and micro levels simultaneously. Only this sickness, this decidedly opportunistic cancer, has never been seen before. Certainly this level of rot has not been diagnosed in our 250-year history.

There’s a quiet kind of pride that doesn’t always show up in loud celebrations. Sometimes, it looks like staying. Sometimes, it looks like leaving.

As the author of “The Book Nook,” a syndicated column I wrote from 1977 to 2006, I met many interesting writers. One of them was Jay Quinn, who passed away without fanfare (except for an obituary in the Walker’s Funeral Home website) on July 28, 2025.