Not surprisingly, I was called “Johnny” as a little kid.  Didn’t love it; didn’t hate it, but it almost entirely disappeared at some point in elementary school.  Only my family and close family friends continued to call me that from then on, and I always allowed them to.  Indeed, it is sad to think of… Read More

It is too early in the COVID-19 crisis, at least for me, to have any real “war stories” about it, other than to acknowledge — as even Trump finally has, if not all of Fox Nation — that it is a crisis.  So I thought I would try to extrapolate instead with some predictions about… Read More

Groucho Marx famously wrote, “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members” in his resignation letter to the Friars’ Club.   Though I consider myself a very sociable extrovert, I have often felt the same way.  And I may come by it honestly, or at least genetically. … Read More

This week’s prompt is a toughie for me.  To be sure, five years ago, we moved my wife’s mother, then 90, up from Florida to an assisted living facility very near where we live in Massachusetts. Caring for her since then — she is now in the dementia unit, though her physical health remains remarkably… Read More

I can usually come up with a story about a Retro prompt, though sometimes not without a further, well, prompt, from the Retro Administrator/Muse.  But I really came up empty on this week’s prompt.  I’m an August baby, but early in the month, so I don’t even have to deal with the sort of half-birthday… Read More

As we know, not all myths are happy ones.  And that certainly goes for family myths.  So let me tell you about my maternal grandfather, one Albert J. Fleischmann.  Or, as my grandmother referred to him, “the Old Man.”  Or simply “that SOB.” If I ever met the Old Man, I was too young to… Read More

Deep rumination about this week’s prompt — and, yeah, a bit of tactful noodging by the Retro Admin to put my storehouse of childhood trivia knowledge to even greater use — has compelled me to write another story on the kids’ cartoons of our youth. I don’t think what I have to say here is… Read More

This week’s prompt is, for me, like a hanging curve ball thrown right into my wheelhouse.  Boy, do I know from children’s TV shows when we were growing up!  As Billy Crystal said in the movie “Forget Paris” when they gave him a paper cup and a copy of Playboy at a fertility clinic and… Read More

My long-standing default mode, for better or worse, is smart ass (“SA”).  Thus, I was tempted to only write in response to this week’s prompt something to the effect of, “Look, as I write this, I’ve been retired for a grand total of five weeks, half of which was spent on an incredible cruise in… Read More

Simply put, we were desperate to move back to a deeply blue eastern state. Read More