I was in rural Italy earlier this month, in a tiny village in Tuscany. Rural Italy is a lot like rural Vermont, except the women wear better shoes and everyone inhales olive oil the way we go through maple syrup. (Note to self: Do not try putting olive oil on pancakes.) Also, they speak English with less of an accent.

In any case, one of my Italian guidebooks listed "10 things to do with children." Though my hairline shows clearly that I haven't been even a teenager in well over a quarter century, I still have the emotional maturity of an 8-year-old. To wit: I still find my cats' hairballs funny. And so I perused the suggestions and saw that one was the San Gimignano Museum of Torture.

San Gimignano is a spectacularly beautiful medieval village built on a hill, which pretty much describes 7,000 other villages in Tuscany. If you look at a map of Tuscany, you'll see that every other village is Montesomething. If I had wanted, I could have taken a day and biked in a circle from Montisi to Montefollonico to Montepulciano to Montalcino and then back to Montisi.

The difference between San Gimignano and most villages is that it has seven massive medieval towers looming over the town, and more tourists per cobblestone than the Ben & Jerry's factory in Waterbury. Imagine Stowe at the peak of the foliage season, and then squeeze in a few thousand additional tourists, five separate parking lots and two dozen gift shops that sell nothing but maple syrup and snow globes of Mount Mansfield.

And, of course, add that torture museum. While my wife and daughter had the common sense to eat gelato and relax by a fountain in the midst of those medieval skyscrapers, I paid my seven euros and went in.

The museum is a collection of antiquarian torture devices, most of which involve wrought iron, ropes or very sharp points. Its ostensible message, if it has one, is that once humans had little regard for human life and were capable of inflicting frightening pain on one another in the name of religion or country or mere self-righteousness. There are the basics, of course, such as the rack and the iron maiden and a functioning guillotine -- which was actually supposed to end torture by killing the victim instantly. There is a dungeon. And there are displays of devices that only a real psychopath could have come up with, a disproportionate number of which seemed to involve impaling people. Everything is explained in five languages, and the diagrams can only be called grisly. I grew up on old Vincent Price movies, but I was getting nauseated and decided to leave.

I was just wondering what sort of lunatic this travel writer must have been to suggest this museum for children, when I came across a group of six Americans: Three teenagers and three adults. They were staring at an exhibit I hadn't noticed. It was a form of water torture, and the diagram explaining the process looked inexplicably familiar. Then I remembered: I had seen an illustration a little like this in 2007, in an article examining whether American interrogators were using torture in the present.

Teenagers, I believe, have pretty sound moral compasses. For every teen who thought it made sense (for example) to vandalize the Robert Frost cabin in Ripton, there were many more who were appalled. And so I wasn't surprised when one of the teens, a boy, turned to his mother or his aunt and observed, "Man. TiVo and torture. I wonder if that's going to be the U.S. legacy in a hundred years."

He was a tad unnerved, as was the rest of the group, and together we all filed out of the museum. Here, it seemed, was yet another parallel between the United States and Italy -- though, unfortunately, it might have been medieval Europe and modern America.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on July 20, 2008.)

Twelve years ago, in 1996, my friends Gerd Krahn, Rudy Cram and I assembled my daughter's wooden swing set. Actually, Gerd and Rudy did most of the assembling because they both worked at Goodrich Aerospace in Vergennes, which meant they were far more competent than I was when it came to understanding the complex aerodynamics and lengthy assembly instructions of a swing set. Also, they were both better than I was at banging nails straight into wood. And that baby used a lot of nails. In addition to swings, it had a slide, a climbing net, and an elevated platform.

The swing set was used by my daughter and her friends in the manner the designers intended for the next five years. Then, beginning around 2001, it served for a while as an impromptu movie set. In that period, my daughter and her pals seemed only to be on the swing set when they were dressed up in dancewear or ball gowns -- purchased for a buck or two each at the annual Lincoln clothing rummage sale -- and using the camcorder to film their activities. Finally, beginning around 2005, it was used largely by our cats as a high perch from which they could lust after birds, which would dart past them like the biplanes that tormented King Kong atop the Empire State Building.

And so this spring we said goodbye to the swing set. The swings and the slide era at our house officially came to an end, and my daughter, 14, passed another marker in her transformation from child to adult. The verdict to part with the swing set was reached quickly, and like many important decisions in my life was made in consultation with the aforementioned Rudy Cram.

Rudy has a tractor and I don't, so Rudy cuts my lawn. Rudy, for those of you who actually have a life and haven't been reading this column Sunday mornings since 1992, is also my next-door neighbor. And when we were surveying my yard at the start of the mowing season, he confessed that the presence of the swing set meant it would cost an extra $4 every time he mowed. Given that he would probably cut the grass 19 or 20 times, this meant that a swing set that is used entirely by my cats was going to cost me $80.

Now, here is how things work when the stars are perfectly aligned. Among Rudy's and my other neighbors are Ethan and Katina Ready. And so I said to Rudy, "I understand. But I was sort of hoping to hang onto the swing set until Ethan and Katina have a baby, and then just walking the swing set over to their yard. It's in pretty good shape."

And Rudy replied, "You haven't heard? Katina's expecting a baby this fall!"

Then, right on cue, at that precise moment Ethan emerged from his house and wandered into his backyard. I nearly brought him down with a flying tackle.

The rest, as they say, is history. It took six strong men to carry the swing set from my yard to the Readys'. And the stars were in such an ideal arrangement that I wasn't even one of those six men. I happened to be on, yes, a book tour. When I returned, the swing set was gone, and by Halloween, I will be $80 richer.

I should note that my daughter had no objection to losing the swing set. I did ask her if she wanted it, and it was as if I had asked if she wanted to spend the summer folding laundry for fun.

The only downside to bidding farewell to the swing set? My cats are sulking.

And, yes, in one more way my daughter's childhood exists only in memory -- and in those videos she made years ago.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on July 13, 2008.)

The first time I went biking in Italy with my friend Greg Levendusky, he handed me a reusable plastic water bottle and off we went. I had a few Euros with me, expecting we would stop somewhere along the way to buy more water or Gatorade.

We never did -- not because we didn't need more water and not because we didn't pass through four different Tuscan hill towns that sold water on our journey. Instead, we refilled our bottles at a wall spigot surrounded by stone lions in a village called Petroio. It wouldn't have crossed Levendusky's mind to buy brand name water in a bottle. It isn't simply his annoyance at the way water has been branded and bottled, or the environmental impact of bottling and shipping those millions and millions of gallons. It's his concern with chemicals that might leach from the bottle lining into the water.

Sometimes I think Levendusky, along with his wife, Pam Powers, are among the most brilliant people I know. My wife went to college with Pam, and I've known them for decades. In 2001, they moved to Italy with their young son, though they spoke only a little more Italian than I do -- and my Italian pretty much consists of the flavors of gelato and how to ask for a bathroom. But their move has worked out rather nicely.

In addition to not drinking branded and bottled water, their family steers clear of aspartame, microwave ovens, and most chemical food additives they can't pronounce. And it is important to note that they have been avoiding aspartame, microwave ovens and bottled water for years -- in the case of bottled water, for instance, well before the current anti-bottled water backlash and new books such as Elizabeth Royte's, "Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It." They worry about toxins in their environment and the ecological ramifications of how they live.

They reside in a town that I have always viewed as a sort of a Tuscan version of Lincoln, the Vermont village in which I live. It's small, people tend to know most of their neighbors, and they have an annual joust.

Lincoln doesn't have a joust, at least not yet, but we do have two parades a year. One of those parades might last almost as long as a television commercial. And we are only a few miles from Bristol, which will have its annual outhouse races on the 4th of July, this coming Friday morning. An outhouse race is a lot like a joust in that talented athletes move at great speeds. The big difference is that instead of riding a regal steed, the outhouse athlete is pulling a homemade one-holer on wheels.

In any case, sometimes I think of Greg and Pam when I am biking here in Vermont and I buy a bottle of water at a convenience store along the route. I think of them on occasion when I swill a diet soda with aspartame. And, yes, I recall their reluctance to own a microwave oven when I defrost some frozen berries at my house and the microwave emits its small ding -- a chirp that is eerily reminiscent of a child's bicycle bell.

Their village is, in their opinion, the Tuscan boondocks, the town that time and tourists forgot and the Internet never quite found. And yet there is something profoundly forward-looking there. Lincoln, too. I have neighbors here who are a lot like Greg and Pam: They grow lots of their own food, they avoid bottled water, and they worry about the size and weight of their carbon footprint.

Sometimes we look toward the big cities to see the trends, and often that's where they begin. Body piercing, for instance. But sometimes the trends that matter most begin in the hills: Small worlds that are not so much backwaters as they are waterfalls of fresh thinking.

After all, just try and find a spigot with seraphim and nymphs on a big city street when you want to refill an empty water bottle.

(This column originally ran in the Burlington Free Press on June 29, 2008.)

Earlier this week, on the very same evening that the Boston Red Sox 2004 and 2007 World Series trophies were on display in Burlington, the Lincoln Little League team made some history of its own. On Wednesday night, for the first time in 22 years, Lincoln won the Mount Abraham District Little League Championship.

"We've started a dynasty," said Turner Brett, 11, the team's second baseman, as he gazed at the championship trophy, which is almost as tall as some of the fifth- and sixth-graders on the team. Brett went three for three in the championship game, a 14 to nothing shutout of the New Haven Wildcats. Sawyer Kamman, the 12-year-old starting pitcher, hurled a no-hitter in the abbreviated contest. Sean Wood, the sixth-grade shortstop, pounded a triple. And Austin Lafayette, also 12, cleared the left-center field fence with his eighth home run of the season. (It's important to note that the New Haven ballplayers are extremely talented, too, and had an excellent year. Making it to the championship game is no shabby accomplishment and they should be very proud.)

The irony, of course, is that while this may be the start of an era for Lincoln, it is just as likely the end of one. It's no easier to repeat in Little League than it is in the Major League. It's not that the star players will be lured to other teams by lucrative contracts or management will make wrongheaded trades that will undermine the team chemistry.

It's the reality that little boys and girls grow up and move on.

Alan Kamman, the Lincoln skipper, observed after the victory that a lot of the reason for the team's success in 2008 was simple longevity. "The team has been together for four years," he said. "They've been playing together since they were in the pee-wee league -- since the minors."

Now most of them will enter seventh grade and leave Little League behind. Certainly many will continue to play baseball and a few years from now some will succeed with the Mount Abraham Union High School Eagles: Five of the Lincoln players will be on the area All Star team, which is just half of the 11-man squad.

Yup, 11. That's how many players Kamman had at his disposal. ("Yeah, you don't do a lot of pinch hitting. And no pinch running," he observed.)

I love Little League. I only got to see parts of three games this year, and that was a loss for me. It's not just the innocence of the players and the naive hopefulness that marks their approach. It's not their inadvertent -- and thus absolutely glorious -- mimicry of the mannerisms of their Major League idols.

Rather, it's the unique idiosyncrasies that mark the fields and the fans and, yes, the players. That home run that Austin Lafayette hit? It landed in a swamp. Where do the Lincoln diehards in the stands get their hot dogs in the second or third inning? The Love Shack, a portable shanty that local pallet mill owner Dan Adam gives to the league for the season, so the moms and dads have a place to cook up the franks when it rains. And the players? Their uniforms are green and the town begins with an "L," and so this year they called themselves the Lincoln Lizards. A little alliteration goes a long way.

Kamman coached with but three rules. Using his fingers he enumerated them for me: "One, have fun. Three, do your best. And two? No hurting Al. Some of those kids have gunshots for arms."

Last week I alluded to the boys of summer, the Brooklyn Dodgers from the late 1940s and 1950s. This week I got to spend time with the real boys of summer -- all of whom, before we know it, will be grownups themselves. It makes building a dynasty difficult. But it sure makes for a great evening at the Little League ball field.

Congratulations to both Lincoln and New Haven. Thanks for another wonderful season.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on June 22, 2008.)

My father would have loved the room I had at the Hotel Commonwealth in Boston last month. It overlooked Fenway Park: the great light stanchions, the bleachers, the towering John Hancock sign.

Like me, my father is a serious baseball fan. Unlike me, however, he isn't especially partisan: He appreciates the sport in general and is as capable of rooting for the Florida Marlins as he is the Boston Red Sox. I think he is most likely to cheer for whichever team is the underdog. Put a team down three games to none in a best-of-seven series, and he is going to be pulling mightily for that team in need of a miracle.

I'm a little like that, too, but I do have my favorites: My beloved New York Mets, followed by the arguably more interesting and idiosyncratic Red Sox. I should admit that in a head-to-head competition I will always be pulling for the Mets, the team of my boyhood in suburbs of New York City.

Consequently, that view I had from the Commonwealth was a real treat because it was at Fenway Park that my favorite team had one of its finest moments. In 1986, down two games to none in the World Series, the Mets went to Fenway and took two of three from the Red Sox, setting the stage for that remarkable game six at Shea -- Mookie Wilson, Bill Buckner, and a dribbler up the first base line -- and the Mets' eventual World Series victory.

Incidentally, I saw those three critical games at Fenway while sitting on a stool at Esox Bar on Main Street in Burlington. I had lived in the city less than three months and knew almost no one, and I watched the game surrounded by Sox fans. (I kept my glee at the Mets victories to myself.)

That was a very long time ago. Ancient history. Buckner has been forgiven, and the Sox are the only team to have won the World Series twice in the new millennium. Meanwhile, those Mets? Plenty of post-season games in the last two decades and change, but no championships.

My father and I went to a lot of ballgames together when I was a boy. And, yes, we really would toss a ball back and forth a la poet and essayist Donald Hall in his beautiful composition, "Fathers Playing Catch with Sons." My father had been a pitcher when he was teenager, a leftie. At least he was usually a leftie. He was ambidextrous and a part of the family lore was that he would become a rightie when he needed to drop a curveball on a right-handed batter.

In any case, I still think instantly of my father whenever I am near a Major League ballpark. I've noticed this in Cleveland, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and most certainly New York. Partly that's because he actually appears in the Yankee Stadium stands in the background of an old Curt Blefary baseball card. But the main reason, pure and simple, is that my father and I went to a lot of games when I was growing up. We didn't live all that far from Yankee and Shea Stadium, and back then a family could visit a Major League game for less than the cost of a Ford Explorer (or, these days, for less than the cost of filling the tank of a Ford Explorer). Even now, there is no more verdant green in my mind than the grass of a Major League outfield when you first emerge from the dark of the tunnel.

And so while we are usually contemplating the players themselves when we refer to the boys of summer (and, in fact, to one specific team from a bygone era), I think when we visit a ballpark we are reminded that once, long ago, we were all boys or girls playing catch with our parents.

Happy Father's Day.

(This column originally ran in the Burlington Free Press on June 15, 2008.)

Just about six and a half years ago in this column I celebrated the unique vocal stylings of Griff Ober. My wife and I first heard Griff sing at the annual winter variety show here in Lincoln. (Note that I called it a variety show and not a talent show. Invariably, the evening has a lot more variety than talent.) With a boom box beside her playing the theme music to National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition,” Griff sang along.

Or, to be precise, she howled along. Griff was 9 at the time, a shelter dog that was part German shepherd, part collie and part hound. It was a bravura performance that left my wife laughing so hard she was sobbing. It’s a miracle she didn’t pull a muscle.

Griff would later appear on local television and on NPR, but her career wound up similar to that of such other one-hit-wonders as Mungo Jerry (“In the Summertime”), Bow Wow Wow (“I Want Candy”), and Charlene (“I’ve Never Been to Me”). Just for the record, that final song has some of the most ridiculous lyrics in the history of pop music. To wit:

“I’ve been to paradise / But I’ve never been to me.”

I have absolutely no idea what that means.

In any case, Griff had the talent to go beyond the theme from “Morning Edition,” but her heart belonged to NPR and it was to that music and to that music alone that she would howl.

Late last month, at the age of 15 and change, Griff joined such other renowned songbirds in the sky as Edith Piaf, Judy Garland and Billie Holiday. She died at her home here in Lincoln on the Sunday morning of Memorial Day Weekend. She was surrounded by her owners, Dan and Sally Ober, their daughters — Emma and Casey — and Sparkle the Duck.

Some of you might recall that Sparkle the Duck has appeared in this column, too. She is the duck that still hasn’t figured out that either she isn’t human or Sally isn’t a duck. She clearly views Sally as her own Mama Mallard.

Griff died of lung cancer early on the day of Emma Ober’s 10th birthday party, which isn’t the way most children want to start that sort of big celebration. But the sun had just risen and the sky was a cerulean blue, and Emma and her sister Casey, who is 8, helped bury Griff beside one of the family’s lilacs — which were at their most aromatic and colorful that weekend. The girls sprinkled dirt on Griff’s grave, as well as small, blue forget-me-not flowers. Emma found a large stone in the garden that she somehow managed to lug around the house for a marker, and then she placed upon it Griff’s collar. Meanwhile, Sparkle pecked at the worms that had been unearthed when Dan had dug Griff’s plot.

In the last two weeks, Sally has been living with a reality that anyone who has lost a dog or a cat or even a hermit crab knows well. “It’s just so hard after pets die,” she says. “You don’t realize how much they’re with you. There’s such an empty hole.”

Sally thinks it is possible that even Sparkle has noticed Griff’s absence: “Griff had an outdoor bed that she would doze in some days, and we kept it on the front porch. Now Sparkle is up there, missing her and looking for her.”

All of us in Lincoln who knew Griff will miss her, too. She was a terrific dog — but even more than that, she was a mighty gifted vocalist and precisely the sort of cabaret act we need in hound heaven. Indeed, as the Righteous Brothers sang back in 1974,

“If there’s a rock and roll heaven,

Well, you know they’ve got a hell of a band.”

Now those are some lyrics I understand.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on June 8, 2008.)

The other day I was on an airplane. You must think I am always on airplanes. I am. There are barn swallows that spend less time in the air than I do.

I was flying home from Nashville via Washington, D.C., and sitting across the aisle from me was a woman in her late-20s who manages a children's clothing store in Tennessee. I mention her job so you know that she has actual, grown-up responsibilities -- work that matters -- and wasn't merely going to the nation's capital because she has something to do with our government. We were sitting opposite the flight attendant, who was facing us in the jump seat.

As we were climbing after takeoff, the woman said to the flight attendant, "I don't fly much. Do you?"

The flight attendant, a woman a little older than the store manager, thought she was kidding and laughed graciously.

"I've never been to Washington," the passenger went on. "I thought it would be a much longer flight to the West Coast."

The flight attendant and I glanced at each other, but I wasn't about to say a word. Then she said patiently to the store manager, "We're going to Washington, D.C. The nation's capital. Are you on the right plane?"

"Oh, I know that," the woman giggled. "I'm going to a wedding there. It just looked so far away on the map."

"Washington state is far away from Nashville," the flight attendant said patiently. "But the capital? Not so much."

At this point the woman said -- and this is an actual quote, not a columnist's hyperbole -- "What? Isn't Washington, D.C., in Washington state? Why would the city not be with the state? Isn't Washington in Washington!"

I won't torment you with the rest of the conversation, but this woman also didn't realize that Chicago was north of Nashville and that the flight east was passing through a time zone. When I explained to her that our time in the air was one hour shorter than it showed on her itinerary because we were moving from the Central to the Eastern Time Zone, it was as if I had just broken the news to her that the Earth revolves around the sun or that some "American Idol" contestants have coaching.

Now, this woman was no idiot. She was pretty sharp when it came to children's coaching. To wit: She told me more than I needed to know about the trend toward organic T-shirts in kids' wear, and she observed rightly that my daughter would have loved her store's "completely rockin' guitar skirts" if she were five or six years younger.

But the idea that she could manage a small business and yet have no clue that Washington, D.C., is three time zones east of Washington state -- or that her own city was a time zone west of the nation's capital -- scared the heck out of me. At the risk of sounding middle-aged and cranky (two things I am, though I try not to flaunt it), I find it disturbing that someone well into her 20s can function in business without having mastered time zones. I would be more forgiving if she lived in parts of Indiana, where no one has mastered time zones because no one's sure what time zone they're in. Eastern? Central? Hoosier? It seems to change annually there. Likewise, it would be one thing to presume Washington, D.C., was near Seattle if you were 7 years old. But 27?

So, here's a solution. Imagine if before any of us could log onto Facebook or iTunes, we had to watch a 15 second edu-bit: One moment it was a map that showed us where Estonia was, for instance, and the next it might be the definition of "ablution." After that there might be a fact about Iraq. Imagine if all television shows (especially reality TV shows) had to offer a 30-second edu-mercial every 30 minutes that taught us something about the Constitution. Or Vietnam. Or ... time zones.

Can we reverse the trend toward imbecility? Probably not. But we can at least encourage adults to know what time zone they're in.

(This column originally ran in the Burlington Free Press on June 1, 2008.)