Editor’s Note

Some people are tone deaf. Others are color blind. I suffer from a more serious malady.

It’s always puzzled me how a state like New Hampshire can assimilate so many outsiders and flatlanders and still retain its character and its quirks.

I think people probably imagine that if they were “discovered” by broadway or hollywood and given a starring role to play they would be able to act without a lot of coaching or training. How hard can it be to pretend to be someone else for a while?

Most stores are designed to sell us something. They locate on main drags with iconic logos created by high-powered ad firms. store colors are chosen by experts, music plays to a beat that encourages hunting and gathering, aisles are carefully mapped for monetary feng shui.

With Curiosity Rover probing the dust of mars and three million personal computers helping seti@home scan the stars for celestial radio signals, any day now we could discover life somewhere else in the cosmos. but as of July 1, 2013, as far as we know, Earth is where it’s at.

Author Bill Bryson, who I met when he lived in Hanover, told me he accepted the title “travel writer” mostly as a convenience for bookstore shelves. He did write about rides in the family car and hiking the A.T. but he also summed up pretty much the entire known universe in his “A Short History of Nearly Everything.”

In my family’s kitchen hangs an embroidery hoop of cross stitching that reads, “Squash Delight: ‘Best Vegetable Recipe Ever’ — Mrs. D.W. Spurlock.”

As we prepared this special “Top Doctors” issue to go to press, the news reported the death of former surgeon general C. Everett koop, whom I had a chance to meet and photograph at his office at Dartmouth back in 1995 for an article on the future of medicine.

This may sound sappy, but the first publication I ever wrote for was my journal - a handmade newsletter with one subscriber: me. I published every day or so when life was particularly fascinating.

Although I've had the pleasure of staying in many lovely hotels over the years (having a husband in the business), I had never stayed at a Ritz-Carlton. I figured this would be the perfect environment in which to make the pitch.