By David Himmel

• The best way to get a feel for a city you’re visiting is to walk it. Pick a destination without a timetable and walk. Duck in to things you find worth ducking into. Read commemorative plaques. Do something touristy but do as the locals do, too. Just do it while walking. Unless it’s cold or rainy. Then run.

• If I had milk-giving breasts, I’d be a better parent. I’d also be far more miserable. My wife is a hapless trooper of will.

• I know we’re not supposed to covet, but yesterday, I couldn’t help myself when I saw JFK’s 25-foot Wianno sloop on a cradle at the 35th president’s Library and Museum. The Victura is the most beautiful vessel I’ve ever seen. It is the kind of boat I aspire to sail with my own family just as Jack did with his. I also coveted Kennedy money yesterday, which is pretty par for the course.

• I’m not as much intelligent as I am perceptive and exhaustingly reflective. If those things make a man intelligent, then, yes, my mother was right — I am the smartest boy in the world.

• My son is really good and happy between 5 a.m. and 3 p.m. After 3 p.m., it’s brooding, hateful, inconsolable misery. In this way, my son and I are identical.

• A bathroom without a fan is a bathroom not worthy of your poop.