Rex Smith

I grew up in the American West, and I still have some family out that way, which is how it happens that I found myself last week casting flies into a clear mountain stream – one of Ernest Hemingway’s favorites, in fact. I was hoping that I might fool a rainbow trout into believing that my little fly might be a delicious dinner.

My mother dropped out of college after two years to get married, and so did her daughter, my older sister. My mom was 19 and my sister was 20 -- both just about at the median age for women to marry for the first time in their days: my mom in 1941, my sister in 1964.

It was the Greek philosopher Heraclitus who wrote, “The only constant in life is change.” People weren’t comfortable with change when he wrote that, some 2,600 years ago, and we’re still not. Sometimes for good reason.

Around this time last year, my wife noticed some black spots on the parsley and dill growing in our garden at home. I didn’t think much of it – the dots looked like bird droppings to me – but my wife got pretty excited: They’re eggs, she said – most likely of the black swallowtail butterfly.

Several days ago a 14-foot-long, 1,600-pound great white shark was spotted off the coast of North Carolina. Here’s the bad news: It was headed north. And last month an even bigger 20-foot shark swept through a pond off Block Island – which is off the coast of Rhode Island.

When I took up a career in journalism a half-century ago, I accepted the task of using words responsibly. You can’t be sloppy with language if your goal is to be accurate; that is, you can’t exaggerate, say, nor can you fail to articulate a harsh reality. Words matter.

I live in a great neighborhood – a place on the edge of a little city, where suburbia kind of meets the rolling hills of the Upstate countryside. It's not just the place we like, though; it’s the people, too.

My daughter is the latest in a line of fine tennis players in our family, so we have an annual end-of-summer dad-and-daughter tradition of spending a day at the U.S. Open. The other day we were on the phone together when early bird tickets went on sale, and within minutes we scored great seats. At one point, as we were looking at an online chart of Arthur Ashe Stadium, my late-Millennial kid asked, “I can’t imagine how you bought tickets before you had the internet.”

American history records some notorious criminals and ne’er-do-wells, but my favorite, who I learned about when I moved out west as a kid, might be a stagecoach robber on the frontier who was known as Black Bart.