It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since the pandemic robbed us of life as we knew it. And in this frightful year I’ve lost several beloved friends.   Although it was cancer and heart disease that took them,  it was Covid that kept us from gathering together to mourn.   Zoom funerals and… Read More

“Use Ajax the foaming cleanser,  foams the dirt right down the drain.   You’ll stop paying the elbow tax,  when you start cleaning with Ajax!” As a kid I loved that silly jingle!   And in fact my mother always told us to use that proverbial elbow grease in whatever we did,  and not just… Read More

The leader of a writing workshop I took years ago asked us to think back to our earliest memories and write about a place our heart remembers.   I thought of my grandmother’s hotel in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York where I spent childhood summers.  (See My Game Mother,   The Troubadour) When I was… Read More

It’s hard to know if I actually remember some of the stories my parents would tell about my naughty or my endearing childhood antics,   or if I’ve simply heard them so often I think I remember them.  But how I got my puppy is something  I remember as if it happened yesterday. When I… Read More

Altho I can’t remember the specifics,  we each must have brought some head gear into the marriage.  (We eloped so surely there were no top hats or bridal veils in our luggage that day!) When we met we were both NY Yankee fans –  me legitimately so as a Bronx girl,  he counterintuitively as a… Read More

On their first wedded Valentine’s Day they had their first big fight.   Angry and hurt,  she ran out to her car before he could stop her. She drove several miles to the small country inn they’d often seen from the highway. To punish him and make him worry,  she promised herself she wouldn’t call.… Read More

When our son was a toddler many friends began fleeing Manhattan.  They couldn’t imagine raising a child amid all the dirt and crime. “But think of the culture!”,  I’d say. Noah at 5,  wide-eyed at the Mets’ Arm & Armor exhibit.   And making Purim masks at the Jewish Museum,  and model dinosaurs at the… Read More

“Tyrants fear the poet.”                                   Amanda Gorman JOHN KENNEDY and ROBERT FROST Inauguration Day 1961,  the handsome young president and the weathered New England poet,   both hatless in the DC January chill. “The land was ours,  before we… Read More

As a kid I gave my parents little trouble and later showed only the usual rebellious teen spirit.  (They disapproved of guys I dated,  but that’s another story). And altho I’ve stood on picket lines,  argued  before the Corps of Engineers against ecologically disastrous city projects,  marched for good causes,  volunteered for a few,  and did… Read More

A few months ago I wrote about three places,  each of which I can claim as a home town.  (See Parkchester, Celebrate Me Home,  The Lady with the Torch,  Kente Cloth) I was born in Charleston, SC yet for most of my adult life I’ve lived on Manhattan’s eastside.  But the east Bronx neighborhood of Parkchester… Read More