Pilgrimages to the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., are final journeys for many of the long-lived veterans of World War II. These elderly men and women from around the nation come every day of the year, but the days surrounding Veterans Day bring them in great numbers. The weather has been good to them this year, so they linger to ponder in comfort, seeing sights and refreshing memories beyond the imagining of one who has not shared them. Still, the atmosphere of the solemn place is...

What’s the value of time?         Told time, that is — not the priceless sort that keeps slipping into the past, flinging you into the future.     When every cell phone tells the time and more, who needs a watch, let alone a fine watch that costs thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars?     That was my question to Steve Hammalian, who is throwing a seminar on the who’s, what’s, how’s of watches...

This isn’t the movies. It’s real life. Surrounding you left and right. But you don’t see it — any more than Dr. Kate Lloyd and her team of Norwegian expeditionaries recognize The Thing.     Through October, the local aliens have gilded the countryside, improving your vista as you travel Maryland highways. Lately, the gold has been fading to sere brown. In the last days of October, farmers will drive their combines into the fields, harvesting soybeans that...

Second acts abound in theater. So it’s a good thing for Chesapeake theater lovers that Lucinda Merry-Browne practices that art and thus is immune to novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous flawed dictum that There are no second acts in American life.     With Lost in Yonkers, the curtain rises on a second — or third or fourth — act for Merry-Browne (Merry is her birth name, not a lingering high school affectation, in case you worried). The first production...