I was a little kid, maybe 4 years old, so my brother was probably 9 at the time, significantly larger than me. We had the kind of roller skates described by Melanie in her 1971 song “Brand New Key”; the kind that attached to our own shoes, then tightened with a key. We were skating… Read More

“Behold it is the Springtide of the year. Over and past is Winter’s gloomy reign. The happy time of singing birds is near, And clad in bud and blooms are hill and plain.” That is the first verse of my favorite Passover song. I sang it in Junior Choir at my Temple. I even sang… Read More

My car radio is always tuned to an NPR station, so I stay informed as I drive around, though in my daily life, my driving tends to be limited. On the day we left Martha’s Vineyard in 2018, the US was embroiled in the Brett Kavanaugh debacle. I packed everything as quickly as I could.… Read More

This morning (March 23) I awoke to a wisp; it was there, just out beyond my reach, on the outer limits of my brain. I want to write it down before I forget it. Dreams rarely make sense, but they can give some insight into what’s on my mind. In this one, I was going… Read More

Chorus is canceled. Trips to California and Europe, which would include visits with our children – gone. Gym shuttered. Restaurants open for take-out only. “First-world problems”, a friend teases. He is right. We have our health, we have food and plenty of toilet paper (what gives with the run on toilet paper?). I did grocery… Read More

Shakespeare usually has something brilliant to say on a topic like this one: “What’s in a name?/A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Like my cousin Mimi (actually Mary Elizabeth), I was named Elizabeth Ann for our paternal grandmother, who was “Elizabeth Prensky Sarason” (so her headstone says), but I never heard… Read More

By 1972 I was half-way through Brandeis and had not seen my brother in two years. He was studying to become a rabbi at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, but was spending two years in Israel, one as part of the regular curriculum, the second at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, digging more deeply into… Read More

I first wrote this story for the prompt “Finding Your Tribe” on March 14, 2020, just before the start of the pandemic, and added an addendum as Massachusetts shut down the next week, then came back last year. Our conductor, Rick Travers, starts every season (I joined this chorus 20 years ago) by saying the… Read More

After Mother’s sister Ann died in Detroit, it became clear she needed to live close to one of her children. Rick and I each showed her a few continuing care communities close to us (my brother lives in Cincinnati) and she chose to come to the Boston area in 1995 at the age of 82.… Read More

Leap Day is a once-every-four-years astronomical anomaly in the calendar, meant to sweep up the few extra minutes accumulated over the intervening years and set the calendar straight again. It happens to coincide with our presidential election years and I’m sure is a pain for people born on this particular day. When do they celebrate?… Read More