Eva Le Gallienne as Peter Pan 1928 ”Do you believe in fairies?” When my mother was young her parents took her to Broadway to see Peter Pan,  the title role played by the actress Eva Le Gallienne who famously flew on wires over the heads of the audience. The London-born Le G as she was called,… Read More

Bike Trail The summer we bought our weekend house in a Connecticut community friends invited us to lunch and introduced us to Alice and her husband David. I learned that Alice had a doctorate in music,  had worked in both the music and the publishing worlds,  sang in a New York chorus,  and was a… Read More

17 Gas Stations  The question is,  why won’t men stop to ask directions? The answer may be in John Gray’s well-known book Men are From Mars,  Women are From Venus.   Or in another fascinating book on gender differences entitled You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation by Deborah Tannen. Tannen,  a linguistics professor, coined the… Read More

Smash-Up I must confess I’m not the best of drivers. (See  Life is a Highway,  Fender Bender,  and  Rainy Night on the Highway) But for years I drove to work,  and so the odds were good that I’d have a few smash-ups along the way. I remember one mishap when Danny and I were newly… Read More

My Favorite Things I confess I’m not very sentimental.  (See With This Ring and Baby Shoes) But there are some things I own that are older than I am and that I treasure. One is certainly the brass dinner bell my grandmother rang to call the guests to meals at her small Catskill hotel.  (See My Heart Remembers… Read More

”And that’s the way it is.” I’ve written about my family dinners as we listened to Lowell Thomas reading the day’s news on our Emerson radio,  and how to my childish sensibility it seemed he was speaking directly to us in the intimacy of our kitchen.   (See Kitchen Radio) Years later on my parents’ black… Read More

Noah R,  Noah G,  and Noah L Three Noahs As you may know it’s traditional in Jewish families to give children the names or initials of loved-ones who have died.   And so when we were expectant parents we planned to name the baby after my late father-in-law whose name was Naftali. My woman’s intuition… Read More

The Writing Life Why do we write?   For me words seem to come easily and I enjoy the writing process.   (See Why I Blog) But here’s what some renown writers have to say about their writing life. “I write because I can’t be satisfied with the colossal job of living … I must order my… Read More

Tradition! As a child I heard Yiddish spoken by my European-born grandparents and my first-generation American parents,  yet I never had the curiosity to learn to speak it myself. But my parents subscribed to New York’s Yiddish theatre company,  the Folksbiene,  and I’d go with them and follow the plays by reading the English supertitles.… Read More

My Father,  the Outsider Artist  My father Arthur was a wise and quite a wonderful guy,  but I don’t remember him doling out wisdom or advice very often.  Rather he taught by example – he was a man of integrity,  warmth,   and an overwhelming kindness,  although he also had some rather annoying idiosyncrasies!    (See… Read More