My mother called me the other day nearly breathless. “I have an idea for another fair entry,” she said.

As we head toward the Agricultural Fair and the farming tradition it celebrates, it is exciting to see Dan Sternbach harvesting this year’s local wheat and rye.

It’s a regular building boom. Sand castles with moats, forts and dredges, dams and tunnels, construction sites that defy names and spark the imagination.

Actor Sterling Hayden was certainly a special case when I first met him one afternoon in 1975 at New York’s Algonquin Hotel restaurant.

Growing up in western Massachusetts, I didn’t have much exposure to the sea, or to seafarers. It was by freak chance that I met my first sea captain.