I thought being on a jury would be helpful in my career as a trial lawyer, and I also thought it would be fun!
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I thought being on a jury would be helpful in my career as a trial lawyer, and I also thought it would be fun!
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302 stories. Seven years. Probably thousands of comments on other people's stories and replies to their comments on mine.
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To help us become proficient in using a mouse, Solitaire was installed on all our computers.
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I do not have a good sense of direction. I'm usually good with maps, unless I have them upside down. And grateful now to have GPS.
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No matter how exhausted or intoxicated I might be, I never go to bed without flossing my teeth!
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I have such strong memories of S&H Green Stamps - the look, the feel, and even the taste of the glue.
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My family has not had any feuds that I know of, although there have been estrangements, which seem like two different things.
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There were two times, one in the '60s and one in the '70s, when something changed my life dramatically,
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I turned 21 in August 1972, but it didn't matter any more, since you could now vote at 18, thanks to the 26th Amendment.
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The maternity clothes in the local stores were too cutesy, as if they wanted to make the mother-to-be look like a little girl.
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I realized there is nothing very hard about cooking as long as you follow the recipe (and don't pick a recipe with too many steps).
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I took my first airplane trip long before my first train trip, but I love trains so much more.
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Here are two fairy tale endings to stories I wrote last month.
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I can't think of one fairy tale that is my favorite, but here are two that have special meaning to me for different reasons.
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Just before my senior year of high school, my mother redid my bedroom with a 5-piece set of teak furniture and a 6' x 9' Rya rug.
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Nordstrom is famous for customer service, including taking back a pair of automobile tires even though they don't sell tires.
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Seems like we had much more fun being in our twenties in the '70s than we do now that we are in our seventies in the '20s!
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This painting, called High Jinx, would have been a dramatic centerpiece for our living room, which has light blue walls.
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Miss Garcelon decided, for whatever reason, that she was going to teach a bunch of six-year-olds about the human body.
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I really need to start writing this. But first ... gotta to check facebook ... play a move in 18 WWF games ... plan dinner.
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We lived a half hour from Manhattan, and theatre tickets were cheap in those days - less than a movie costs now!
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For me, there are all kinds of magic to be found -- in music, books, acrobatics, and even websites that fix themselves.
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When I was little, nobody offered to run along behind me to teach me to ride a bike. This is not so surprising.
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My father had just traded in his early ’50s Cadillac for a brand new 1960 Chrysler Imperial, like the beauty in the featured image.
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I walked around the house looking for antiques. We have a few, but I don't own any of them. However the house is older than I am.
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This prompt asks what is the first news story we remember. For me that's easy. It was Quemoy and Matsu.
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Why did my parents give me the most popular girl's name of the Fifties? I guess they just liked it.
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If not for Retrospect, I would probably not be writing at all.
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No, fromlostiano is not the name of a song, as far as I know. It is a Spanish word for comical Spanish-to-English translations.
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His cardinal rule: to the outside world we must always present a united front.
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She captioned the needlepoint "Hobby Time" because when I was asked what my hobbies were, I generally said "sleeping."
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I'm not sure I've ever encountered any banned books, but if I had, I would have made a point of reading them.
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My vision has been bad for so much of my life, I can barely remember a time when it was good. Until now.
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When I bemoaned some terrible day I had had, she probably did say "there'll be days like this". . . but you'll get through them.
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In a Basket Raffle, you deposit your raffle tickets only in the baskets of the items you want to win.
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What is the difference between an immigrant and a refugee? I pondered this question while writing my story.
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Between March 2020 and March 2021, I wrote five stories about the pandemic, my own plague journal a la Daniel Defoe.
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Photo booths were great in the days when we didn't have cameras - black and white photo strips preserved our memories.
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The most memorable hotel I have ever stayed at is Mohonk Mountain House, for its architecture, comfort, and -yes- food.
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I will admit to cheating at cards when I was young, but it was solitaire, so I wasn't cheating anyone else.
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The house I grew up in had many wonderful features, including an attic and a basement, and both were put to good use.
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Daylight Savings Time starts tomorrow. Harumph! I expect that I will feel grumpy and out of sorts for the next week.
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It was quite a job putting the bed frame together, although I don't remember whether it required any trips to the hardware store.
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I loved being a Girl Scout, and I appreciated Girl Scouts even more when I became a troop leader.
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Hidden books, '70s television shows, and Words With Friends have all been guilty pleasures for me.
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Moon River was almost cut from Breakfast at Tiffany's; fortunately they kept it in and it won the Oscar for best original song.
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Best of all is dark chocolate, the darker the better. When I am in need of comfort, that's where I go.
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Don't try to make me change my mind with facts, To hell with the graduated income tax. How do I know? I read it in the Daily News
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My cousin recently sent me this picture, which I had never seen before, taken around 1925.
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I do not relate to the idea that group photos are no longer in vogue. For me they are a constant in my life!
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Among my 252 previous stories, I have had a few about trips on highways and byways. Here I attempt to revisit some of those trips.
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On one very memorable New Year's Day I married my second husband.
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Things that have made me laugh over the years: phony phone calls, Firesign Theatre, Dave Barry, cat filters on Zoom, and my son.
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I have certainly done things that would have made for juicy gossip, I just don't know whether they got talked about or not.
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Board games with dice, mah jongg with dice, and the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York.
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He loved to say "You can trust me, I'm a doctor!" And people did.
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Occasionally I would open a letter from a camp friend to find it didn't have news, just a request to be part of a chain.
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There are times when I regret thinking it was a good idea to have my own website when I don't know how it works.
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Covid 19 is the worst imaginable lemon, with no sign that it will ever be gone. The glass of lemonade is Zoom.
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Wherein I discuss parallel parking as well as a stint on the Attorney General's Office Parking Committee.
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Looking back at all these treasured books, it's hard to find any unifying theme. Why did I love them so much? I don't know.
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Of the many wonderful variety shows on the air in our youth, here are five I remember fondly.
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In this cartoon, all the jurors are looking at their phones. Is that how it started, these shorter and shorter attention spans?
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We ate in the kitchen at a big round table that had plenty of room, even when there were seven of us there.
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In the last eighteen months, there have been so many tragedies that I couldn't even say which was the worst.
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I was going to call this story Ticket To Ride, but I used that for my Woodstock story. My thanks to Duke Ellington for this title.
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Someone had to fix the holes the plumbers made, not to stop our minds from wandering, but to make the house look normal again.
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I find myself walking into a room and saying "What did I come in here for?" This happens more often than I care to admit.
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I was first introduced to dating dos and don'ts when I was eight years old and my two older sisters started dating.
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It was a magical summer - exotic, and romantic, and educational too! I will never forget That Summer.
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Despite the title, from a song I love, for me there is no such thing as being too long at the fair!
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If a hobby is "an activity done regularly in one's leisure time for pleasure," my only true hobby as a child was reading.
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These are the anniversaries important to me (in no particular order).
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I love this photo from a family trip in August 1957, where we are sitting in a carriage (not a surrey) with fringe on top.
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I have never held, or even touched, a gun of any kind except for toy guns and water pistols.
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From 1985-2000 I was rarely without my diaper bag. There was only one time in all those years that I took a trip and forgot it.
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Cole Porter wrote the song "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" for the musical High Society. This story is NOT about that game show.
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In high school everyone knew it was important to join lots of clubs, because it looked good on your college application.
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I never had a pet til I was almost 30, but since then I have lived with Loretta, Hillary, Tipper, and Mitzi, four wonderful cats.
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This was in late 1972, when recycling of glass had just become a thing, and we wanted to do our part.
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On the central question of this prompt: Can I separate the art from the artist? I guess my answer is "sometimes."
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Clock-radio, transistor, car radio, boom box, record player-radio combo. All great for listening to my beloved rock 'n' roll.
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I'm glad my mother was at home for me. I liked having her there all the time.
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Long before the Covid vaccine, there were two other deadly diseases in our lifetime for which vaccines were a miracle cure.
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I am drowning in a digital sea,
I am slipping beneath the sound,
Here my voice goes to ones and zeros.
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Most rewatchable movie ever: Casablanca. Close second: almost any movie starring Audrey Hepburn.
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One of the best baby shower presents I received when my first child was born was Miss Manners' Guide to Rearing Perfect Children.
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Things were getting better. Or were they?
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Of my long list of pet peeves, I am only going to discuss three. I don't want you to think I am an insufferable grammar snob.
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Even though the hairdresser at Best's gave me a terrible haircut, the trauma may not have been entirely her fault.
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I have written my own Journal of the Plague Year in five chapters. I'm thrilled that this fifth chapter is the last!
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Thinking about advertising jingles of my youth, what first popped into my mind was two toothpaste commercials.
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On Thursdays we got to stay for lunch, which was very exciting - chicken noodle soup and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
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I met Ellen in the summer of 1968 when we were both working at the McCarthy for President national campaign headquarters.
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I am not a big fan of Valentine’s Day, a holiday that creates such high expectations that one is almost bound to be disappointed.
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We would go to Bloomingdale's and Saks and try on all the hats in the hat department until the sales people threw us out.
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I had been desperately awaiting this day for more than two months, but the insurrection two weeks earlier had me terrified.
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Getting into good trouble can be risky. I wasn't sure which to be more afraid of, Covid-19 or Republican voter intimidation tactics.
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Instead of "thinking back" to my youth, here is a potpourri of some of my favorite museums visited in the last dozen years.
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I wasn't going to write, because I thought you had it pretty well together, and you wouldn't listen to my advice anyway.
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I was never much of a TV watcher until two things happened. First, my son gave us a Roku. Second, the pandemic.
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Risking covid to save the nation. Wish me luck!
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Darkness is not "my old friend."
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The most interesting part of my college interview story is not the interview itself, but the journey to get there.
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Proper spelling has always come naturally to me, and I'm happy that I was able to pass that trait on to my children.
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My experiences volunteering for Harvard. Word count: 1636. Coincidence? I think not!
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Nobody is coming to our house for Thanksgiving this pandemic year, it's just the two of us.
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Hula hoops and Twiggy lashes, but not at the same time.
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The time I almost lost my phone when it fell out of my pocket and went skittering down the storm drain.
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There are three elections in my lifetime that still haunt me, and probably always will. 1968, 2000, and 2016.
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Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow was Bill Clinton's campaign song.
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"I'm at a payphone trying to call home/All of my change I spent on you."
Maroon 5 sang this song in 2012, and I had to laugh.
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These may not be the type of blue suede shoes that Elvis was singing about, but they are currently my favorite dressy shoes.
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As an adult, I have given public final farewells for three important people in my life: my father, my mother, and my ex-husband.
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"You have cataracts, and you should have surgery as soon as possible." I was stunned. Only old people have cataracts, I thought.
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I love word games and crossword puzzles. But here's the thing - to me they are social activities, done with other people.
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I am always delighted to enjoy any garden, as long as someone else does the work to maintain it.
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In my house, it is my husband who is always losing things, and asking me to find them for him. And I always do.
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We call them garage sales rather than yard sales, even though they are more likely to be out on front lawns than in garages.
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Although I wish it were not so, I realize there are three areas where I have done things I swore I'd never do.
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In 1961, Elvis sang "Little sister, don't you do what your big sister done." But I was always trying to do what my big sisters did.
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This is a story about a time that I tried to forgive and did such a bad job of it that I ruined the friendship entirely.
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It has been nineteen weeks since we first started trying to "flatten the curve." How are we doing? Results are mixed.
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This is an op-ed piece my daughter Molly wrote for her college newspaper back in 2016.
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Mainly what I remember about learning script was that there were letters I liked and letters I didn't like.
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Marching with thousands of other people, chanting "This is what democracy looks like!" at the top of our lungs, felt great!
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What was the best thing about Belleville? That it was only 13 miles from Manhattan.
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This chance encounter in September 1974 didn't change my life, but it certainly changed the lives of the other two people involved.
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If you say something embarrassing, you may be able to deny it plausibly. That's not the case if you embarrass yourself IN WRITING!
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It's amazing that I managed to get this story written at all, with so many old issues of Mad Magazine waiting to be re-read.
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I decided this time to look at the flip side of the coin and write about my own experience as an aunt.
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I have so much memorabilia that I don't even know where to start writing about it.
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Of course I loved this Little Golden Book, whose main character had my name, the way I spelled it at the time.
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Superstitious? Who me? No way!
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I smell lots of good scents, but nothing that triggers any memories. My memory triggers are auditory rather than olfactory.
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Life is weird right now, but not terrible. I'm sad about Molly's graduation being cancelled, and not singing with my choir.
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I was approached by a young woman who asked if she could come to my house to show me some amazing knives. I said yes.
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"All I Have to Do is Dream," "Sweet Dreams are Made of This," "Dream Weaver," "Dream a Little Dream of Me," "The Impossible Dream". . . . It seems that every songwriter has something to say about dreams. They have all been running on a loop in my brain this week.
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This year, sadly, there are no spring celebrations. COVID-19 has taken them away from us.
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It was probably the most traumatic event of my life, and certainly the most traumatic event of Molly's.
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I am booked on a flight on PSA, called "The World's Friendliest Airline," with smiles painted on the front of all their planes.
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Shirley, Shirley Bo-ber-ley, ba-na-na fanna Fo-fer-ley. fee fi mo-mer-ley, Shirley! No, that's not the name game I'm talking about.
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Alternative song title (courtesy of The Police): Don't Stand So Close To Me
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At different times in my life, I have had different "tribes," but for the last 22 years it has been the choir at my synagogue.
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I wish now that I had spent more time being a caregiver for my mother in the last years of her life.
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Half-birthdays and pirates make Leap Day more than just another day.
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Our cousin Betty, before she became a celebrity to the pre-school set, was in a Broadway musical called Cafe Crown.
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The story is about my father, who was born in 1909, got his bachelor's degree from Rutgers University in 1928 or '29, went to work as a pharmacist in the family drugstore, but wanted to be a doctor,
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Comparing children's TV of the '50s and the '90s, I think the '90s win.
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Everywhere you look this week, you see Super Bowl LIV. I have to laugh. Where else in American society does anyone use Roman numerals any more? The only places I can think of are the cornerstones of buildings (and now I’m wondering if modern buildings even have cornerstones) and the copyright date shown in the…
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I have made a total of eight moves in my life, and it is astonishing how many details I have forgotten.
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The Marvelettes had it right with “Please Mr. Postman.” Back in the pre-electronic days, waiting for the postman to come with the day’s mail was agonizing when you were hoping to hear from someone (“Is there a letter in your bag for me?”). If there was nothing it was such a letdown. (“So many days…
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My high school was a small, selective public high school on the campus of Montclair State College that admitted 30 students in each grade, 15 boys and 15 girls. It went from seventh through twelfth grade, so you can imagine how well we got to know each other, such a small group spending six years…
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I am not organized, and I have no particular desire to be. You can figure this out as soon as you walk into my house. Well, sometimes the downstairs looks organized, because we scoop everything up and take it upstairs if we know we are having company. This leads to some chaos in the upstairs…
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Originally this story was titled “Closing Out the ’70s in my 20s.” It began as follows: I know you are surprised that I didn’t use a song for the title of this story. But I just remembered this particular New Year’s Eve while I was in the shower this morning, and wanted to get the…
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As you can see from the movie poster above, the name of the movie I am writing about is Knock Down the House, but I kept thinking that the 1983 song by the Talking Heads, Burning Down the House, would have made a better title. Maybe the filmmakers wanted to call it that, but the…
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I get very grouchy this time of year. I hate going into any kind of store, because they are invariably playing Christmas music. Even if they avoid the blatantly religious songs, and stick to “Holly Jolly Christmas” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” it’s still a reminder that for this entire month I am…
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There were five of us girl cousins who grew up together, my mother’s three daughters, and her sister Daisy’s two. They were my only first cousins, and the only cousins I ever knew. Each of my parents had one sibling, and my father’s sister didn’t have any children. There probably were some second cousins on both…
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We are the world, We are the children, We are the ones who make a brighter day, so let’s start giving. Oh, there’s a choice we’re making, We’re saving our own lives, It’s true we’ll make a better day, just you and me. This song, written by Michael Jackson and sung by an ad hoc…
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My parents didn’t keep baby books, but they did keep photo albums. The kind with the black construction paper pages. They pasted the pictures in, or else sometimes the pictures were held by those photo corners with adhesive on the back. They made an album for each of their three daughters. At some point, after…
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I saw the notice on facebook, of all places, where it had been posted by the mayor of Sacramento, whom I follow. The city had just created an Ethics Commission, and all interested Sacramento residents were invited to apply. So I thought, why not? I found the application online, filled it out, and submitted it…
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As I often do when I am writing a Retrospect story, I started out by googling “songs about [name of prompt].” For Ageism, I could find almost nothing; apparently it isn’t a topic that songwriters are inspired by. But I did find a reference to “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena” as being the first…
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The Gershwin song “I’ve Got A Crush on You” doesn’t really get the crush concept right. The lyrics say “You had such persistence, you wore down my resistance, I fell, and it was swell . . . . I’ve got a crush on you, sweetie pie.” So she’s singing to him after they get together.…
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What is bullying? I struggle with the term. Maybe it’s one of those “I know it when I see it” type of things. Stopbullying.gov, an official government website (it says so!), defines bullying as “unwanted, aggressive behavior among school aged children that involves a real or perceived power imbalance. . . . Bullying includes actions…
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I would be remiss in my discussion of the Newark Public Library if I did not mention Philip Roth's novella Goodbye Columbus.
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The scamming emails seem to come in constantly. Fortunately, they generally go into my spam folder and I never even see them. Here’s one of the most recent ones: Greetings, I was searching through a local business directory when I found your profile. I am Soliciting On-Behalf of my private client who is interested in…
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When each of my first two kids was born, I stayed home for a year, and when I went back to the AG’s Office (part-time) they went to a daycare center. That seemed to work pretty well. But with the youngest, we thought it made sense to have someone come to our house, because she…
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Long-time Retrospect readers may recall my story Bridge Over Troubled Waters about how I played bridge for many years, mostly in high school and college, and my conclusion that I was a much better bridge player when I was stoned. I ended that story with the following passage: “Once I had my first baby, 32 years ago,…
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My nephew, a New York actor who is currently appearing in Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, recently posted this story on his facebook page. I loved it so much that I wanted to share it here. With his permission, I am reprinting it exactly as he wrote it, along with one of his photos…
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At first I couldn’t think of any experience that would rise to the level of road rage. Annoyance with another driver who did something stupid, sure. Maybe a little cursing under my breath, or an occasional blast on my rather wimpy horn. But nothing that I would really call rage. I joked that I was…
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Most people associate the word “tutor” with someone hired to give individual remedial instruction in a course that one is having trouble with. However at Harvard, following the model of Oxford and Cambridge, students have tutorials in their field of concentration in their second, third, and fourth years. Sophomore tutorial is in a small group,…
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I already knew how to read when I got to kindergarten. I could write my first name in capital letters. I also knew colors and numbers and days of the week. This was partly because my sisters thought it was fun to teach me, and partly because, as the third child in the family, I…
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When I was little, Susan and the Rain was one of my favorite books. Of course it was partly because my name is Susan, but also because I hated the rain. Here’s how it starts: Susan Amantha Cottonwood was a little girl who was always good – when the sun…
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It is the fiftieth anniversary of Woodstock, and for the past week there have been Woodstock stories everywhere I look. Every newspaper and magazine, print or online, seems to have a story written by someone who was there. PBS aired a new documentary last week subtitled Three Days That Defined a Generation. (Does that title…
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So far, I haven’t had any desire to have my DNA tested, even though so many other people I know are doing it. I don’t really want that information falling into the wrong hands, and more importantly, I don’t think I would find out anything about my ancestry that I don’t already know. However, there’s…
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I always wanted a neighbor that I could talk to over the back fence. You see it in comic strips, TV shows and movies. BFFs who live next door to each other. But I wonder if it ever happens in real life. In my childhood, we knew our neighbors but were not friends with them.…
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“Shlog dein kup en vant!” This is as close as I can get to what my parents said to me in Yiddish when I was a child, if I ever said “I’m bored, what should I do?” It means “go bang your head against the wall.” It was said lovingly, and of course I knew…
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Sunday, July 20, 1969. “The Eagle has landed.” Hard to believe that it has been fifty years since we heard those words! Yes, I remember watching the moon landing, but my story about it has more questions than answers. Principally, what was I doing in Cambridge that weekend? It was the summer between my freshman…
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I rarely go to the beach, and when I do, I am generally either working on my suntan (I know, very dangerous, but I still do it) or cooling off in the water. I can’t remember ever bringing a book to the beach either as a child or as an adult. But I do like…
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Watching all those colorful explosions shooting through the sky just makes me happy.
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The first time I lied about my age, I was five years old. It was my parents’ idea. Our family was visiting the United Nations in New York – perhaps one of my older sisters was studying it in school – and to get in to the General Assembly gallery at that time you had…
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Twenty-six miles across the sea Santa Catalina is a-waitin’ for me, Santa Catalina, the island of romance, romance, romance, romance. We got married in March, and the big honeymoon we planned was a trip to Kenya on a photo safari with an adventure travel company, plus an additional week in the Seychelle Islands, because my…
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A blind date to a boring movie is not a recipe for success
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I grew up in Belleville, New Jersey (1960 population 35,005), in a house on Washington Avenue, the main street of town. Directly across the street was a movie theater, a Shell gas station, and a drugstore. The featured image is the drugstore, and you can see a little bit of the Shell sign on the lefthand…
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Before I start my own story, I have to explain how this prompt, College Majors as Career Gaugers, came about. I subscribe to a listserv of members of the class preceding mine at my alma mater, which actively discusses myriad topics on a daily basis. A few months ago, somebody posed the question: did your…
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When I think of social media, the first thing I think of is Facebook. For me, Facebook was always about sharing pictures and bits of news with family and friends who are scattered around the world. Now, in addition, it involves sharing links to articles about the current terrifying political situation. I have never considered…
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Physical Education, or Gym as we called it, was by far my least favorite class in high school. First of all, we had to wear these horrible gymsuits, one-piece numbers that snapped up the front. They were hideous looking things, as you can see from the Featured Image. No girl looked good in them, no…
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Wow, blue books! So many memories! I considered calling the story “Blank Space” — because there was always a lot more blank space than writing in my blue books — but figured this crowd wouldn’t know the Taylor Swift song, so I went with a 1970 song that applies equally well to my exam-taking experience.…
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The driving age in NJ, where I grew up, was 17 for some reason, even though in almost every other state in the union it was 16.
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At my elementary school, which I attended from 1956 to 1962, we never hid under our desks or heard the phrase “duck and cover.” We had our own fallout shelter to protect us from the Russians. The school was a large building, three stories plus a basement, which took up (in my memory at least)…
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In 1965, Tom Lehrer recorded the song “Pollution,” purporting to give advice to a foreign traveler visiting the US. If you visit American city You will find it very pretty Just two things which you must beware Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air. At the time it seemed funny, since usually it…
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Let me tell you how it will be There’s one for you, nineteen for me ‘Cause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman The Beatles, who had grown up poor, weren’t very happy to discover once they were making oodles of money that the British government was going to take most of it. Not sure…
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There are many poets whose work I cherish. For instance, Robert Frost. I can easily recite all four stanzas of “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” and most of “The Road Not Taken,” although I don’t recall ever intentionally trying to memorize them. I love anything by e. e. cummings. I don’t know any…
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Faithful readers of Retrospect may recall my story on the prompt Beaches, which included memories of two spring break trips I took three decades apart: a 1961 trip with my parents and sisters to Fort Lauderdale shortly after the movie Where the Boys Are came out; and a 1992 trip to Maui with my future second husband…
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Hillary. Rodham. Clinton She has been a woman I admire since 1992. There is so much I could say about her, but like the speaker “who needs no introduction” and then gets one anyway, it just doesn’t seem necessary. Everyone knows about her, and all the truths and lies that have been attached to her…
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They smilin’ in your face All the time they want to take your place The back stabbers. . . . What follows is not the only story of betrayal that has occurred in my life, but let’s just say that it’s the only one that I’m willing to make public. Putting out on the internet…
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I lived in my first — and only — apartment building the summer after my sophomore year of college. I had snagged a great summer job working for Houghton Mifflin Publishing Co. in Boston. My dear friend Kit, who was part of my Comstock Hall crowd, had a job as a research assistant for a…
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This might be one of the scariest things I’ve ever done! A new beginning as a website owner/administrator is not something I ever expected. It feels a little like riding on this ferris wheel. When John and Patti announced that Retrospect would cease operations on December 31, 2018, I felt bereft. It had been such…
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To everything there is a season. . . . The first time the prompt Turning Points appeared was in August 2016, and I wrote Universe ablaze with changes about the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. That event was a major turning point in my life, setting me on the political course that I have followed ever since.…
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I am not an easy person to buy presents for. I know that, and I discourage family members from buying me things. Because I hardly ever like them. They will invariably be the wrong color, or the wrong size, or the wrong shape, or just not something that is useful to me. Even jewelry, I…
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This is the house I grew up in, a two-story red brick house with a full attic and basement, on a corner lot in Belleville, New Jersey. My father’s medical office is on the side, you can see the entrance to it on the far right in the picture. My parents moved into this house…
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I grew up singing. My family sang all the time. On holidays and other occasions we would gather around the piano and sing, sometimes in unison, more often taking different parts. In the early years, it was my aunt Daisy who played the piano, but at some point my oldest sister took over that role. If…
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I am reposting the story I wrote for the prompt “Gratitude” two years ago, with updates. I decided to do it this way, rather than just move the old story to this prompt, because this will be my 100th story! Thank you for your indulgence. *** Thanksgiving was always the most special holiday in my family…
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Fiorello! is a wonderful musical about New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia (yes, he’s the one for whom the airport is named). It ran on Broadway from November 1959 through October 1961. I went to see it with my mother on Election Day 1960. One of the songs in the musical, “Politics and Poker,” contains…
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When I was a kid, my friends and I used to love making phony phone calls. I don’t know why it seemed so hilarious, but it did. We would dial a number that we picked at random out of the telephone book. When someone answered, we would say “Is your refrigerator running?” They would say…
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Accessories? I have never been into purses or shoes or hats or scarves. I have bought all those things, of course, but only as needed, not in a collecting kind of way. However, in junior high school, I wore bows in my hair almost every day. My coiffure may not have been the angel hair…
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I always thought it was a sillly competition. Why did people expect you to declare allegiance to only one band, the Rolling Stones or the Beatles? I loved them both! I see now that I bought 13 Beatles albums and only 10 Stones albums (and I have photographed both sets on my living room carpet),…
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I love parties! I almost always have a great time at them. Certainly college parties are among my fondest memories of those years. But for me, the good ones don’t seem to make for interesting stories. So here’s a story about the worst party of my life. 1966. The drinking age in New Jersey was…
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Middle School. . . . In our day they called it Junior High School. I don’t know when the name was changed, or why, but in any event, I never went to one. My first school was a K-8, and my second school was a 7-12. My town didn’t have a Junior High at that…
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A relative of mine became famous as a result of a combination of factors that could not possibly have been anticipated.
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The one year of my life that had the greatest impact on me was definitely 1968.
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I am not comfortable with group nudity. I’ve managed to change clothes discreetly in locker rooms and dorm rooms, even while those all around me were letting it all hang out. I have never gone to a nude beach or a nude hot tub party. Sorry, that’s just not me. But there was one time…
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I have never been on a diet. I don’t say this to brag, just stating a fact. I have no idea how many calories are in anything. I have never read a diet book or listened to a diet guru. I eat whatever I want to, and stop when I feel full. Yet I have…
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I first saw this photo after my mother died. My oldest sister, who is the repository of all the family photos that my parents had (because she lived the closest), was scanning many pictures and emailing them to my other sister and me for use in the shiva-type services we were each having in our…
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This is the story of the prom nobody remembers. Literally. All I know is who I went with and what I wore. Jeff, the boy I had been dating since New Year’s Eve of senior year, was a sophomore at Rutgers, but came home every weekend to see me. So when I asked him to…
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In my early twenties I had absolutely no interest in babies. I didn’t find them cute, or interesting, or cuddly. When friends or classmates were showing off their babies, I would of course say Oh your baby is so adorable, but I actually thought they were ugly and noisy and smelly. I certainly didn’t want…
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“The Perfect Nanny” is a song from the movie Mary Poppins, in which the children describe the characteristics they want in a nanny. You must be kind, you must be witty Very sweet and fairly pretty Take us on outings, give us treats Sing songs, bring sweets We were lucky enough to find our own perfect…
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As a child I was a voracious reader, devouring all the book series that were popular at that time — The Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames, Sue Barton, and Honey Bunch and Norman. Of these five, the only one that seems to have survived is Nancy Drew. Maybe a girl detective has more staying…
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I was seventeen years old and I was ready to learn how to be a revolutionary.
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Then: Kneeling down in front of the ironing board to iron my hair, so that it will be pin straight, as the fashion dictates. Sometimes burning my left hand (which is holding the hairbrush) with the tip of the iron in my right hand, because I can’t see what I’m doing. Now: What’s an ironing board? Electric…
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Daisy was a wonderful singer and taught me many songs, including "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" and "Go Tell Aunt Rhody."
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Billy Joel probably never ate at the Italian restaurant my family favored when I was young, since he grew up in New York, not New Jersey, but he must have had a similar place in mind when he wrote the song “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.” Don’s 21 was located on McCarter Highway in Newark,…
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“Everybody’s a dreamer, everybody’s a star,” sang the Kinks in their 1972 song “Celluloid Heroes.” So true. I nominate this song to be the permanent theme song of the Academy Awards show. First movie: Sayonara. As far as I remember, this was my first movie in a theatre, although I probably saw others on television…
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“What do you remember about Watergate?” asks this week’s prompt. I am finding it a very difficult question to answer. Right now I could tell you everything that happened from the night of the break-in at Democratic Headquarters on June 17, 1972 (two days after I graduated from college), to the resignation of Richard Nixon…
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Every time I have seen the phrase “teenager in love” – starting with the first time this prompt appeared in Retrospect two years ago – I have read it as teen-A-ger, with the accent on the second syllable, rather than TEEN-ager, the usual pronunciation, with the accent on the first syllable. In contrast, if the…
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I loved being a lawyer. I can't think of any other career I would have rather had. Except for being a rock 'n' roll singer - that would have been the best.
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Sometimes you can work it out, sometimes you can’t. I’ve had a lot of roommates, starting as a 17-year-old college freshman, and ending when I bought my first house at age 27. CAVEAT: This story is way too long to sustain anyone’s interest, so I advise reading maybe about half of it. Once I started…
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In September 1958 I had just turned seven, and I was in Mrs. Smith's second-grade class
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Memorial Day to the Fourth of July, a good length of time for a vacation
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A companion piece to Khati's story entitled 1969.
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We were early adopters of email, and also of cellphones. Our first email account was through CompuServe, and our user name was a string of numbers that we didn’t even get to pick, so for me they were impossible to remember. My 32-year-old daughter Sabrina, however, can still recite that string of numbers, twenty-some years…
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In the summer of 1970 the Harvard Glee Club and Radcliffe Choral Society had the wonderful opportunity to sing two concerts at Tanglewood, with Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa. It was an exciting time. We spent the week before the concerts living at Tanglewood, with many rehearsals but also quite a bit of free time.…
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I am a reunion junkie! I love them, and it always makes me sad when friends choose not to attend. Last month, October 2017, I had two incredible reunions two weeks apart — my college 45th and my law school 40th. I was on the planning committees for both reunions, worked hard to make them…
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For my parents, the gender roles were clear. My mother was in charge of the house and the family, my father dealt with the outside world and earned the money to support us. He might have disagreed with some of the decisions she made regarding us kids, but he would have no more told her…
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My birthday falls at the end of August, which is a lovely time of year, but a terrible time to have a birthday when you are young.
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The Who, in their song My Generation, famously said “Hope I die before I get old.”
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It was 1974, and after two years of working at the US Department of Transportation, I was ready to quit my job and go to law school. I had applied to several schools on the East Coast, as well as UC Berkeley and two other California schools that I didn’t know much about. Those last…
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My oldest sister went off to Radcliffe College in September 1962, just as I started seventh grade. I was fascinated with Radcliffe – the apple trees with circular benches around them in Radcliffe Yard, the nine old homey-looking brick dorms around the lush green Quad – and with the bustling Harvard Square area. It seemed…
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Looking back at August-September 2001 brings to mind the opening of A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The two weeks prior to what we now just refer to as 9/11 contained some of the best times of my life, and then, of course, the…
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How is the Ku Klux Klan still a thing? In old movies we see those white-sheeted ridiculous-looking figures riding on horseback through the countryside, carrying fiery torches, setting the shacks of poor black people ablaze and leaving burning crosses to light up the night. But this is in the past, right? Wa-a-a-ay in the past!…
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On March 10, 2008, I had my annual mammogram. Never a pleasant experience, but tolerable, and I dutifully went every year without giving it much thought. That year was different. A few days afterwards the imaging center called me and said they wanted to do another mammogram of my right breast, so on March 20…
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The first time this prompt, “What We Watched,” appeared, I wrote a story about the television shows I loved growing up, TV shows of my youth. That was the very first story I posted on Retrospect, and it started me on a wonderful adventure which has continued through 60 stories so far, with many more yet to…
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Inspired by John Zussman's republishing his story from the 2017 prompt "Let's Put On a Show."
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1967. The Summer of Love was the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. I was going to turn sixteen at the end of August — which meant that I had been claiming to be sixteen for months. I thought I was very sophisticated and wise. Retrospect readers may have already seen…
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Story from 2017, moved to this prompt in response to John's story Great Performances.
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In the summer of 1965 I decided I wanted to learn how to play the guitar. I was turning 14 at the end of the summer, and it was my second year at a leftist work camp called Lincoln Farm. One of my favorite aspects of camp was the singing we did — at campfires,…
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Memories of three beach trips that I hadn't thought about for years triggered by a Retrospect prompt.
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Paul Simon’s song “Father and Daughter” starts out “If you leap awake / In the mirror of a bad dream…” This reminds me of my favorite story about my father, which I have told to my children numerous times. When I was little, I had a recurring nightmare about a witch chasing me. I think…
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Giving the graduates a mix tape of advice
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Memorial Day weekend in Sacramento is most notable for the Dixieland Jazz Jubilee, which has occurred every year since 1974. It is an amazing four days of music and fun, with bands from all over the country and the world who make the pilgrimage to northern California to play traditional jazz. I didn’t discover it until…
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I first published this story six years ago for the prompt "Too Young to be This Old."
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Mainly I remember my mother’s closet as a great place to play hide and seek. It was a big walk-in closet shaped like an L, so you could go around the corner to hide and a seeker might just look in the doorway and not see you. There was also a little door that led…
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When I was little — practically from birth — I had a best friend named Bette. Her parents were good friends with my parents, and she had two older sisters whose ages roughly corresponded to the ages of my older sisters. Our two families rented houses next door to each other at Lake Hopatcong every summer.…
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It was the end of the summer of 1992. Ed and I had bought a beautiful big old house and moved into it with my two children, seven-year-old Sabrina and four-year-old Ben. It seemed like the right time to get a kitten. We knew if we took the kids with us to the animal shelter,…
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I must confess that I have never been very interested in science. Conversations on scientific topics tend to make my eyes glaze over. My only good science experience was in first grade. We had a lovely teacher named Miss Garcelon, who had just graduated from teachers college, and we were her first class. She decided, for…
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Faith, for me, is a complicated topic. As I said in an earlier Retrospect story, I mostly don’t believe in God. But for some reason I’m not quite ready to rule out the possibility entirely. For instance, all through my years in school, when I was nervous about an exam, I would talk to God, saying “if…
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My house is across the street from a park with several baseball diamonds, and around the corner from a school whose baseball field and snack shack are the headquarters for the local Little League. Every year on opening day there is a parade that goes past my house, with pickup trucks full of screaming little…
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Summer 1967 It’s the Summer of Love in San Francisco Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. Meanwhile, across the country, A high school girl, not quite sixteen, End-of-summer birthday, Tall and thin, with curly hair she irons straight, And glasses which she seldom wears Feels too old to go to camp, Off to a summer…
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When I was growing up, my family had a ton of board games, and a finished room in the basement where we kept them all and played them with our friends or with each other. Chiefly I remember Sorry and Chutes & Ladders when I was really young, and then Monopoly and Clue when I was…
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Posting this on International Women's Day!
* * * * * * *
I was a feminist long before I knew such a word existed.
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Is it okay to be frivolous in these dark times?
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Steal This Book, said Abbie Hoffman
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This song demanded that I write about it
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This story may or may not turn out to be about cooking. Mainly it is about my mother, who, as I write, is lying in a hospital bed holding on to life by only the slenderest of threads. By the time you read this, the thread may have snapped. But she will always be a…
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Usually I write the story first and then look for a song for the title. This time I picked the song first. It is the third week in January, the week between Martin Luther King’s birthday and the ending of the Obama Administration. I feel like it is the last week before our country descends into…
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Facebook. Such a silly thing when it started, just a way for college students to check each other out, find out if someone was available or in a relationship, whatever. When it expanded beyond those with an “edu” email address and became available to all, I joined, at the invitation of a friend who wanted me…
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Readers of Retrospect may recall my maternal grandparents from two other stories, No Way To Say Goodbye, about my grandfather’s death, and Which Side Are You On?, in which I discussed their flight from the Cossacks and their search for the American Dream. They were a significant part of my childhood, living with my parents, my sisters, and me in our…
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I first published this story three years ago, on the prompt New Beginnings. Since it only got 3 comments, I’m thinking most of you never saw it. So here it is again. I’m feeling a little more optimistic now about 2020 than I was three years ago about 2017, but our country is not out…
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I’m writing this on the day after the Electoral College met and actually, officially, chose that awful man to be the next President of the United States. In the six weeks since the election I have been wishing for something to happen to prevent this from occurring. First I wished (and confidently believed) that the…
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Chanukah has always been my favorite holiday. Not because of the gifts — my parents actually gave us our gifts on Dec. 25th when the rest of our friends were getting theirs — but because I loved lighting the candles, singing the traditional songs, playing dreidel, and eating Chanukah gelt (chocolate circles wrapped in gold…
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The musical Hair opened on Broadway in April 1968, and I saw it some time that spring with my friend Amy, who lived in Manhattan. Amy had been my roommate the previous summer at a program for high school students at Syracuse University. It was Amy who first introduced me to marijuana, so it was…
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Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday.
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All four of my grandparents came to this country around 1900 from the area we loosely referred to as Russia, although borders were fluid then. My grandfathers were leaving to avoid serving in the czar’s army, and they were all fleeing from Cossacks and pogroms and the terrors of anti-Semitism. They settled on the Lower…
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I began this story on Monday, November 7. Here was my first paragraph: I am starting to write this the night before the election. The anxiety and suspense are palpable. Perhaps by the time I finish it, we will have elected our first woman President. I then wrote a few paragraphs about the political views of my…
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How do you tell your teenage children that their father has died?
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My first experience with death was my grandfather’s, when I was eleven years old. Both of my maternal grandparents (Nana and Papa) lived with us in our big brick house in New Jersey, and had for as long as I can remember — possibly since before I was born. My grandmother had one of the…
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Celebrating Halloween through the years with costumes and candy.
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I don’t remember a time when I couldn’t read music. I must have learned at about the same time I learned to read words, around three years old. It has always been a part of my life. I took piano lessons and then oboe lessons, but the thing I always liked the best was singing.…
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My mother was not much of a cook. She made dinner every night for 30 years (except for the occasional restaurant meal), and then, when my father retired and the kids were all grown up and gone, she never cooked again. She certainly never imbued any of her three daughters with a love of cooking,…
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When I was a little girl, I always imagined that when I grew up I would have three children. That’s how many there were in my family, and it seemed like just the right number to me. However, I vowed, they would be close enough in age that they could all hang out and have fun…
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Instead of a heart-to-heart talk, we sang along with a "classic rock" station at the top of our lungs.
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This story was originally written for the prompt "Something Wild."
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When I graduated from college, I was pretty sure I wanted to go to law school eventually, but I was VERY sure that I wanted to take some time off from school first. I was sick of writing papers and taking exams and always having some assignment hanging over my head to make me feel…
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On this particular November Friday, we were sitting in home ec class learning how to make salad dressing.
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I had met someone who seemed like the love of my life a couple of years earlier, and it hadn’t worked out (although it would when the time was right). On the rebound from him, I started dating the handsomest guy in the entire Attorney General’s Office, who had already slept with every other attractive single woman…
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Why did it take so long for someone to come up with the idea of putting wheels on suitcases? I can remember so many trips, not only in my childhood but in my young adulthood as well, that involved lugging heavy suitcases that I could barely pick up. You might think this would have encouraged…
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A birth, a death, a national election, or even someone new that you meet by chance, can turn your life upside down and make it so much better or worse.
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My parents bought the car in the fall of 1965. It was a 1966 model, and they custom-ordered it with all the features they (and I) wanted. I was 14 years old, a sophomore in high school, and the age to get a driver’s license in New Jersey was 17, so I clearly wasn’t going…
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Summer camp was a major part of my childhood experience. Not only the eight weeks I spent there each summer, but the letters back and forth to camp friends for the other ten months of the year. We poured out our hearts to each other in ways that we would never do with friends at home.…
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Bits and pieces of many trips lodged in my memory.
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“Sisters, sisters, there were never such devoted sisters.” This 1954 Irving Berlin song was sung by Rosemary Clooney in the movie White Christmas, and my sisters and I learned to sing it at an early age. And we are devoted, it’s not just a song lyric. I feel incredibly lucky to have my two sisters. As I…
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Whenever I hear the term "white wedding" now, the Billy Idol song starts running through my head.
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The girls wore long gowns and white gloves, and the boys wore tuxedos. The girls also carried bouquets of long-stemmed roses in colors that were coordinated with our gowns.
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I was born on my father's 42nd birthday. He always said that I was the best birthday present he ever got.
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How basketball saved my sanity in law school.
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Sixties and Seventies music is still the best!
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The summer before college I had a job that changed my entire life. If only it had changed the nation's history as well.
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Two college girls on a somewhat risky summer adventure.
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Looking back at modern dance lessons in Manhattan, and the drive through the Holland Tunnel to get there.
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A freshman girl is daring enough to ask a senior boy to the Sadie Hawkins Dance.
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What happened when a new principal tried to impose a dress code in a high school where the students wouldn't follow anyone else's rules.
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The three TV shows that were an important part of my childhood, all of whose theme songs I can still easily sing from memory.
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All Rise
Prompted By Jury Duty
/ Stories
I thought being on a jury would be helpful in my career as a trial lawyer, and I also thought it would be fun!
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Try To Remember
Prompted By Retrospect Retrospective
/ Stories
302 stories. Seven years. Probably thousands of comments on other people's stories and replies to their comments on mine.
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Computer Age
Prompted By My First Computer
/ Stories
To help us become proficient in using a mouse, Solitaire was installed on all our computers.
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Do You Know the Way to San Jose?
Prompted By Directionally Challenged
/ Stories
I do not have a good sense of direction. I'm usually good with maps, unless I have them upside down. And grateful now to have GPS.
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Smile a Little Smile For Me
Prompted By The Dentist
/ Stories
No matter how exhausted or intoxicated I might be, I never go to bed without flossing my teeth!
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Stuck Like Glue
Prompted By Retail Rewards
/ Stories
I have such strong memories of S&H Green Stamps - the look, the feel, and even the taste of the glue.
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No Matter What
Prompted By Family Feud
/ Stories
My family has not had any feuds that I know of, although there have been estrangements, which seem like two different things.
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Ch-ch-ch-changes
Prompted By Changed My Life
/ Stories
There were two times, one in the '60s and one in the '70s, when something changed my life dramatically,
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Power to the People
Prompted By First Time Voting
/ Stories
I turned 21 in August 1972, but it didn't matter any more, since you could now vote at 18, thanks to the 26th Amendment.
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Material Girl
Prompted By From Catalogs to Amazon
/ Stories
The maternity clothes in the local stores were too cutesy, as if they wanted to make the mother-to-be look like a little girl.
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Cheeseburger in Paradise
Prompted By Learning To Cook
/ Stories
I realized there is nothing very hard about cooking as long as you follow the recipe (and don't pick a recipe with too many steps).
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The LocoMotion
Prompted By Planes and Trains
/ Stories
I took my first airplane trip long before my first train trip, but I love trains so much more.
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Fairy Tale Endings
Prompted By Favorite Fairy Tale
/ Stories
Here are two fairy tale endings to stories I wrote last month.
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An Opening for a Princess
Prompted By Favorite Fairy Tale
/ Stories
I can't think of one fairy tale that is my favorite, but here are two that have special meaning to me for different reasons.
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Good Old Desk
Prompted By Feathering Our Nests
/ Stories
Just before my senior year of high school, my mother redid my bedroom with a 5-piece set of teak furniture and a 6' x 9' Rya rug.
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Keep the Customer Satisfied
Prompted By Customer Service
/ Stories
Nordstrom is famous for customer service, including taking back a pair of automobile tires even though they don't sell tires.
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Eight Miles High
Prompted By Drugs and Alcohol
/ Stories
Seems like we had much more fun being in our twenties in the '70s than we do now that we are in our seventies in the '20s!
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Shades of Blue
Prompted By Priciest Purchase
/ Stories
This painting, called High Jinx, would have been a dramatic centerpiece for our living room, which has light blue walls.
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You Have Made A Difference
Prompted By Favorite Teacher
/ Stories
Miss Garcelon decided, for whatever reason, that she was going to teach a bunch of six-year-olds about the human body.
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Put It Off Until Tomorrow
Prompted By Procrastination
/ Stories
I really need to start writing this. But first ... gotta to check facebook ... play a move in 18 WWF games ... plan dinner.
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Give My Regards To Broadway
Prompted By Memorable Performances
/ Stories
We lived a half hour from Manhattan, and theatre tickets were cheap in those days - less than a movie costs now!
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This Magic Moment
Prompted By Do You Believe in Magic?
/ Stories
For me, there are all kinds of magic to be found -- in music, books, acrobatics, and even websites that fix themselves.
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Pedal Your Blues Away
Prompted By Riding a Bicycle
/ Stories
When I was little, nobody offered to run along behind me to teach me to ride a bike. This is not so surprising.
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Breakdown
Prompted By Car Trouble
/ Stories
My father had just traded in his early ’50s Cadillac for a brand new 1960 Chrysler Imperial, like the beauty in the featured image.
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Diamonds and Rust
Prompted By What I Own That's Older Than I Am
/ Stories
I walked around the house looking for antiques. We have a few, but I don't own any of them. However the house is older than I am.
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We Just Disagree
Prompted By Broadcast News
/ Stories
This prompt asks what is the first news story we remember. For me that's easy. It was Quemoy and Matsu.
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Whisper My Name
Prompted By What's in a Name
/ Stories
Why did my parents give me the most popular girl's name of the Fifties? I guess they just liked it.
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If they asked me, I could write a book
Prompted By Why We Write
/ Stories
If not for Retrospect, I would probably not be writing at all.
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Fromlostiano
Prompted By Lost in Translation
/ Stories
No, fromlostiano is not the name of a song, as far as I know. It is a Spanish word for comical Spanish-to-English translations.
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Father and Daughter* (RetroFlash)
Prompted By What My Father Told Me
/ Stories
His cardinal rule: to the outside world we must always present a united front.
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Sweet Dreams Are Made of This
Prompted By Sleepy Time
/ Stories
She captioned the needlepoint "Hobby Time" because when I was asked what my hobbies were, I generally said "sleeping."
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Take It To The Limit
Prompted By Banned Books
/ Stories
I'm not sure I've ever encountered any banned books, but if I had, I would have made a point of reading them.
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I Can See Clearly Now
Prompted By The Eyes Have It
/ Stories
My vision has been bad for so much of my life, I can barely remember a time when it was good. Until now.
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Mama Said There’ll Be Days Like This
Prompted By What My Mother Told Me
/ Stories
When I bemoaned some terrible day I had had, she probably did say "there'll be days like this". . . but you'll get through them.
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With a Little Luck
Prompted By Auctions and Raffles
/ Stories
In a Basket Raffle, you deposit your raffle tickets only in the baskets of the items you want to win.
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Coming to America
Prompted By Refugees
/ Stories
What is the difference between an immigrant and a refugee? I pondered this question while writing my story.
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Here We Go Again
Prompted By Pandemic, Year Three
/ Stories
Between March 2020 and March 2021, I wrote five stories about the pandemic, my own plague journal a la Daniel Defoe.
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Photographs and Memories
Prompted By Photo Booths
/ Stories
Photo booths were great in the days when we didn't have cameras - black and white photo strips preserved our memories.
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Memory Motel
Prompted By Hotels, Motels, Inns, and Hostels
/ Stories
The most memorable hotel I have ever stayed at is Mohonk Mountain House, for its architecture, comfort, and -yes- food.
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What I Wouldn’t Do
Prompted By Cheating
/ Stories
I will admit to cheating at cards when I was young, but it was solitaire, so I wasn't cheating anyone else.
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The House That Built Me
Prompted By Basements and Attics
/ Stories
The house I grew up in had many wonderful features, including an attic and a basement, and both were put to good use.
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Time Is On My Side (yes it is!)
Prompted By Changing Times
/ Stories
Daylight Savings Time starts tomorrow. Harumph! I expect that I will feel grumpy and out of sorts for the next week.
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If I Were A Carpenter
Prompted By Some Assembly Required
/ Stories
It was quite a job putting the bed frame together, although I don't remember whether it required any trips to the hardware store.
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Let Me Call You Sister
Prompted By Scouting
/ Stories
I loved being a Girl Scout, and I appreciated Girl Scouts even more when I became a troop leader.
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Let the Guilt Go
Prompted By Guilty Pleasures
/ Stories
Hidden books, '70s television shows, and Words With Friends have all been guilty pleasures for me.
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Moon River
Prompted By One Song That Moves Me
/ Stories
Moon River was almost cut from Breakfast at Tiffany's; fortunately they kept it in and it won the Oscar for best original song.
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Savoy Truffle
Prompted By Comfort Food
/ Stories
Best of all is dark chocolate, the darker the better. When I am in need of comfort, that's where I go.
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(I Read It In the) Daily News
Prompted By Newspapers
/ Stories
Don't try to make me change my mind with facts, To hell with the graduated income tax. How do I know? I read it in the Daily News
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Every Picture Tells A Story
Prompted By Group Photos
/ Stories
My cousin recently sent me this picture, which I had never seen before, taken around 1925.
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Kodachrome
Prompted By Group Photos
/ Stories
I do not relate to the idea that group photos are no longer in vogue. For me they are a constant in my life!
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Highway 61 Revisited
Prompted By Highways and Byways
/ Stories
Among my 252 previous stories, I have had a few about trips on highways and byways. Here I attempt to revisit some of those trips.
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Let’s Start the New Year Right
Prompted By Resolutions
/ Stories
On one very memorable New Year's Day I married my second husband.
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Laugh, laugh, I thought I’d die
Prompted By Comic Relief
/ Stories
Things that have made me laugh over the years: phony phone calls, Firesign Theatre, Dave Barry, cat filters on Zoom, and my son.
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Everybody Talks
Prompted By Gossip
/ Stories
I have certainly done things that would have made for juicy gossip, I just don't know whether they got talked about or not.
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Tumbling Dice
Prompted By Dice
/ Stories
Board games with dice, mah jongg with dice, and the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York.
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Doctor Robert
Prompted By Family Medicine
/ Stories
He loved to say "You can trust me, I'm a doctor!" And people did.
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Chain of Fools
Prompted By Chain Letters
/ Stories
Occasionally I would open a letter from a camp friend to find it didn't have news, just a request to be part of a chain.
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96 Tears
Prompted By Regrets
/ Stories
There are times when I regret thinking it was a good idea to have my own website when I don't know how it works.
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Lemon Eyes
Prompted By Lemons to Lemonade
/ Stories
Covid 19 is the worst imaginable lemon, with no sign that it will ever be gone. The glass of lemonade is Zoom.
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Parking Spot
Prompted By Parking
/ Stories
Wherein I discuss parallel parking as well as a stint on the Attorney General's Office Parking Committee.
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Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Prompted By Children's Books
/ Stories
Looking back at all these treasured books, it's hard to find any unifying theme. Why did I love them so much? I don't know.
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The Beat Goes On
Prompted By Variety Shows
/ Stories
Of the many wonderful variety shows on the air in our youth, here are five I remember fondly.
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It Won’t Be Long
Prompted By Attention Span
/ Stories
In this cartoon, all the jurors are looking at their phones. Is that how it started, these shorter and shorter attention spans?
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Eat At Home
Prompted By Mealtime
/ Stories
We ate in the kitchen at a big round table that had plenty of room, even when there were seven of us there.
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The End of the World, part two
Prompted By 9/11 Twenty Years Later
/ Stories
In the last eighteen months, there have been so many tragedies that I couldn't even say which was the worst.
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Take the A Train
Prompted By Going to Work
/ Stories
I was going to call this story Ticket To Ride, but I used that for my Woodstock story. My thanks to Duke Ellington for this title.
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Fixing A Hole
Prompted By Home Repair
/ Stories
Someone had to fix the holes the plumbers made, not to stop our minds from wandering, but to make the house look normal again.
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I Remember It Well
Prompted By Senior Moments
/ Stories
I find myself walking into a room and saying "What did I come in here for?" This happens more often than I care to admit.
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When Will I Be Loved?
Prompted By Dating
/ Stories
I was first introduced to dating dos and don'ts when I was eight years old and my two older sisters started dating.
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Summer of ’66
Prompted By That Summer
/ Stories
It was a magical summer - exotic, and romantic, and educational too! I will never forget That Summer.
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Been Too Long at the Fair
Prompted By State or County Fair
/ Stories
Despite the title, from a song I love, for me there is no such thing as being too long at the fair!
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Groovin’ is My Hobby
Prompted By Hobbies
/ Stories
If a hobby is "an activity done regularly in one's leisure time for pleasure," my only true hobby as a child was reading.
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Glory Days
Prompted By Anniversaries
/ Stories
These are the anniversaries important to me (in no particular order).
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The Surrey With the Fringe On Top
Prompted By Family Trips
/ Stories
I love this photo from a family trip in August 1957, where we are sitting in a carriage (not a surrey) with fringe on top.
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You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun
Prompted By Guns Then and Now
/ Stories
I have never held, or even touched, a gun of any kind except for toy guns and water pistols.
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Irreplaceable
Prompted By Can't Leave Home Without It
/ Stories
From 1985-2000 I was rarely without my diaper bag. There was only one time in all those years that I took a trip and forgot it.
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Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Prompted By Quiz and Game Shows
/ Stories
Cole Porter wrote the song "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" for the musical High Society. This story is NOT about that game show.
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Welcome to the Club
Prompted By Cliques and Clubs
/ Stories
In high school everyone knew it was important to join lots of clubs, because it looked good on your college application.
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Get Back
Prompted By Naming Pets
/ Stories
I never had a pet til I was almost 30, but since then I have lived with Loretta, Hillary, Tipper, and Mitzi, four wonderful cats.
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Message in a Bottle
Prompted By Recycling
/ Stories
This was in late 1972, when recycling of glass had just become a thing, and we wanted to do our part.
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Sympathy for the Devil
Prompted By Separating the Art from the Artist
/ Stories
On the central question of this prompt: Can I separate the art from the artist? I guess my answer is "sometimes."
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Raised On Radio
Prompted By Remembering Radios
/ Stories
Clock-radio, transistor, car radio, boom box, record player-radio combo. All great for listening to my beloved rock 'n' roll.
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A Mother Like You
Prompted By Stay-at-Home Parent
/ Stories
I'm glad my mother was at home for me. I liked having her there all the time.
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Hit Me With Your Best Shot
Prompted By Vaccination
/ Stories
Long before the Covid vaccine, there were two other deadly diseases in our lifetime for which vaccines were a miracle cure.
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Digital Sea
Prompted By Technology Tribulations
/ Stories
I am drowning in a digital sea,
I am slipping beneath the sound,
Here my voice goes to ones and zeros.
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Unforgettable
Prompted By Rewatchable Movies
/ Stories
Most rewatchable movie ever: Casablanca. Close second: almost any movie starring Audrey Hepburn.
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Please Please Me
Prompted By Manners
/ Stories
One of the best baby shower presents I received when my first child was born was Miss Manners' Guide to Rearing Perfect Children.
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I Don’t Know How It Feels To Be U
Prompted By Inequality
/ Stories
Things were getting better. Or were they?
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I’ve Got a Little List
Prompted By Pet Peeves
/ Stories
Of my long list of pet peeves, I am only going to discuss three. I don't want you to think I am an insufferable grammar snob.
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Don’t Touch My Hair
Prompted By Haircuts
/ Stories
Even though the hairdresser at Best's gave me a terrible haircut, the trauma may not have been entirely her fault.
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Losing A Whole Year
Prompted By One Year of the Pandemic
/ Stories
I have written my own Journal of the Plague Year in five chapters. I'm thrilled that this fifth chapter is the last!
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Brusha Brusha Brusha
Prompted By Advertising Jingles and Slogans
/ Stories
Thinking about advertising jingles of my youth, what first popped into my mind was two toothpaste commercials.
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A Taste of Honey
Prompted By First Memory
/ Stories
On Thursdays we got to stay for lunch, which was very exciting - chicken noodle soup and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
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Somewhere Out There
Prompted By Reconnecting
/ Stories
I met Ellen in the summer of 1968 when we were both working at the McCarthy for President national campaign headquarters.
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My Funny Valentine
Prompted By Valentine's Day
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I am not a big fan of Valentine’s Day, a holiday that creates such high expectations that one is almost bound to be disappointed.
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Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat
Prompted By Hats
/ Stories
We would go to Bloomingdale's and Saks and try on all the hats in the hat department until the sales people threw us out.
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This Land Is Your Land
Prompted By Inaugurations
/ Stories
I had been desperately awaiting this day for more than two months, but the insurrection two weeks earlier had me terrified.
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Georgia On My Mind
Prompted By Good Trouble
/ Stories
Getting into good trouble can be risky. I wasn't sure which to be more afraid of, Covid-19 or Republican voter intimidation tactics.
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Starry, Starry Night
Prompted By Art and Art Museums
/ Stories
Instead of "thinking back" to my youth, here is a potpourri of some of my favorite museums visited in the last dozen years.
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I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You
Prompted By Letter to My Younger Self
/ Stories
I wasn't going to write, because I thought you had it pretty well together, and you wouldn't listen to my advice anyway.
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Watching the Detectives
Prompted By What Are You Bingeing?
/ Stories
I was never much of a TV watcher until two things happened. First, my son gave us a Roku. Second, the pandemic.
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Midnight Train to Georgia
Prompted By Hello Darkness
/ Stories
Risking covid to save the nation. Wish me luck!
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Dark Side of the Moon
Prompted By Hello Darkness
/ Stories
Darkness is not "my old friend."
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Expecting to Fly
Prompted By Interviews
/ Stories
The most interesting part of my college interview story is not the interview itself, but the journey to get there.
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R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Prompted By Spelling
/ Stories
Proper spelling has always come naturally to me, and I'm happy that I was able to pass that trait on to my children.
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Harvardiana
Prompted By Volunteering
/ Stories
My experiences volunteering for Harvard. Word count: 1636. Coincidence? I think not!
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Two of Us
Prompted By Pandemic Holidays
/ Stories
Nobody is coming to our house for Thanksgiving this pandemic year, it's just the two of us.
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Dedicated Follower of Fashion
Prompted By Fads and Trends
/ Stories
Hula hoops and Twiggy lashes, but not at the same time.
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Call Me, Maybe
Prompted By Random Acts of Kindness
/ Stories
The time I almost lost my phone when it fell out of my pocket and went skittering down the storm drain.
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The Worst That Could Happen
Prompted By Ghosts of Elections Past
/ Stories
There are three elections in my lifetime that still haunt me, and probably always will. 1968, 2000, and 2016.
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Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow
Prompted By Buttons, Pins, and Badges
/ Stories
Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow was Bill Clinton's campaign song.
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Payphone
Prompted By Life Before Computers
/ Stories
"I'm at a payphone trying to call home/All of my change I spent on you."
Maroon 5 sang this song in 2012, and I had to laugh.
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Blue Suede Shoes
Prompted By Shoes
/ Stories
These may not be the type of blue suede shoes that Elvis was singing about, but they are currently my favorite dressy shoes.
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No Way to Say Goodbye, part three
Prompted By Final Farewell
/ Stories
As an adult, I have given public final farewells for three important people in my life: my father, my mother, and my ex-husband.
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Doctor My Eyes
Prompted By Rites of Passage
/ Stories
"You have cataracts, and you should have surgery as soon as possible." I was stunned. Only old people have cataracts, I thought.
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It’s Only Words, and Words Are All I Have…
Prompted By Brain Games
/ Stories
I love word games and crossword puzzles. But here's the thing - to me they are social activities, done with other people.
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Saturday in the Park
Prompted By The Garden
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I am always delighted to enjoy any garden, as long as someone else does the work to maintain it.
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Lost in the Shuffle
Prompted By Lost and Found
/ Stories
In my house, it is my husband who is always losing things, and asking me to find them for him. And I always do.
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Who Will Buy?
Prompted By Yard Sales
/ Stories
We call them garage sales rather than yard sales, even though they are more likely to be out on front lawns than in garages.
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Cry Me A River
Prompted By I Swore I'd Never
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Although I wish it were not so, I realize there are three areas where I have done things I swore I'd never do.
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Little Sister
Prompted By Birth Order
/ Stories
In 1961, Elvis sang "Little sister, don't you do what your big sister done." But I was always trying to do what my big sisters did.
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A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You
Prompted By Forgiveness
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This is a story about a time that I tried to forgive and did such a bad job of it that I ruined the friendship entirely.
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Long Long Time
Prompted By Pandemic Summer
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It has been nineteen weeks since we first started trying to "flatten the curve." How are we doing? Results are mixed.
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A Millennial View
Prompted By Cursive — Curse or Blessing?
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This is an op-ed piece my daughter Molly wrote for her college newspaper back in 2016.
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Handwriting On The Wall
Prompted By Cursive — Curse or Blessing?
/ Stories
Mainly what I remember about learning script was that there were letters I liked and letters I didn't like.
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Takin’ It To The Streets
Prompted By Protests
/ Stories
Marching with thousands of other people, chanting "This is what democracy looks like!" at the top of our lungs, felt great!
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My Little Town
Prompted By My Hometown
/ Stories
What was the best thing about Belleville? That it was only 13 miles from Manhattan.
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It Was Meant 2 B
Prompted By Chance Encounters
/ Stories
This chance encounter in September 1974 didn't change my life, but it certainly changed the lives of the other two people involved.
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Sealed With A Kiss
Prompted By Embarrassment
/ Stories
If you say something embarrassing, you may be able to deny it plausibly. That's not the case if you embarrass yourself IN WRITING!
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Mad About You
Prompted By Magazines
/ Stories
It's amazing that I managed to get this story written at all, with so many old issues of Mad Magazine waiting to be re-read.
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Aunt Suzie
Prompted By Aunts & Uncles
/ Stories
I decided this time to look at the flip side of the coin and write about my own experience as an aunt.
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My Favorite Things
Prompted By Memorabilia
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I have so much memorabilia that I don't even know where to start writing about it.
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Green Onions
Prompted By Recipes
/ Stories
Of course I loved this Little Golden Book, whose main character had my name, the way I spelled it at the time.
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I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover
Prompted By Superstitions
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Superstitious? Who me? No way!
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Smells Like Teen Spirit
Prompted By Fragrant Flashbacks
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I smell lots of good scents, but nothing that triggers any memories. My memory triggers are auditory rather than olfactory.
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Don’t Stand So Close to Me
Prompted By Pandemic - Pandemonium or Panacea?
/ Stories
Life is weird right now, but not terrible. I'm sad about Molly's graduation being cancelled, and not singing with my choir.
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Somebody’s Ringin’ the Bell
Prompted By Door-to-Door Sales
/ Stories
I was approached by a young woman who asked if she could come to my house to show me some amazing knives. I said yes.
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River of Dreams
Prompted By Dreams
/ Stories
"All I Have to Do is Dream," "Sweet Dreams are Made of This," "Dream Weaver," "Dream a Little Dream of Me," "The Impossible Dream". . . . It seems that every songwriter has something to say about dreams. They have all been running on a loop in my brain this week.
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Dayenu
Prompted By Spring Celebrations
/ Stories
This year, sadly, there are no spring celebrations. COVID-19 has taken them away from us.
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Can’t Find My Way Home
Prompted By Trauma
/ Stories
It was probably the most traumatic event of my life, and certainly the most traumatic event of Molly's.
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Big Old Jet Airliner
Prompted By Close Calls
/ Stories
I am booked on a flight on PSA, called "The World's Friendliest Airline," with smiles painted on the front of all their planes.
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The Name Game
Prompted By Nicknames
/ Stories
Shirley, Shirley Bo-ber-ley, ba-na-na fanna Fo-fer-ley. fee fi mo-mer-ley, Shirley! No, that's not the name game I'm talking about.
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Don’t Get Around Much Any More
Prompted By Vacation or Staycation from Hell
/ Stories
Alternative song title (courtesy of The Police): Don't Stand So Close To Me
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Puttin’ On the Ritz
Prompted By Finding Your Tribe
/ Stories
At different times in my life, I have had different "tribes," but for the last 22 years it has been the choir at my synagogue.
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Lean On Me
Prompted By Caregiving
/ Stories
I wish now that I had spent more time being a caregiver for my mother in the last years of her life.
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Another Day
Prompted By Leap Day
/ Stories
Half-birthdays and pirates make Leap Day more than just another day.
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Sunrise, Sunset
Prompted By Family Myths
/ Stories
Our cousin Betty, before she became a celebrity to the pre-school set, was in a Broadway musical called Cafe Crown.
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Doctor, Doctor, Give Me the News
Prompted By Family Myths
/ Stories
The story is about my father, who was born in 1909, got his bachelor's degree from Rutgers University in 1928 or '29, went to work as a pharmacist in the family drugstore, but wanted to be a doctor,
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Winky Dink and Me
Prompted By Children's TV Shows
/ Stories
Comparing children's TV of the '50s and the '90s, I think the '90s win.
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Backfield in Motion
Prompted By Super Bowl
/ Stories
Everywhere you look this week, you see Super Bowl LIV. I have to laugh. Where else in American society does anyone use Roman numerals any more? The only places I can think of are the cornerstones of buildings (and now I’m wondering if modern buildings even have cornerstones) and the copyright date shown in the…
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Movin’ Out
Prompted By Moving Day
/ Stories
I have made a total of eight moves in my life, and it is astonishing how many details I have forgotten.
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Please Mr. Postman
Prompted By Snail Mail
/ Stories
The Marvelettes had it right with “Please Mr. Postman.” Back in the pre-electronic days, waiting for the postman to come with the day’s mail was agonizing when you were hoping to hear from someone (“Is there a letter in your bag for me?”). If there was nothing it was such a letdown. (“So many days…
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Don’t You (Forget About Me)
Prompted By Tracking People Down
/ Stories
My high school was a small, selective public high school on the campus of Montclair State College that admitted 30 students in each grade, 15 boys and 15 girls. It went from seventh through twelfth grade, so you can imagine how well we got to know each other, such a small group spending six years…
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It Ain’t Me, Babe
Prompted By Get Organized
/ Stories
I am not organized, and I have no particular desire to be. You can figure this out as soon as you walk into my house. Well, sometimes the downstairs looks organized, because we scoop everything up and take it upstairs if we know we are having company. This leads to some chaos in the upstairs…
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Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
Prompted By The New Year
/ Stories
Originally this story was titled “Closing Out the ’70s in my 20s.” It began as follows: I know you are surprised that I didn’t use a song for the title of this story. But I just remembered this particular New Year’s Eve while I was in the shower this morning, and wanted to get the…
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Burning Down the House
Prompted By Quick Take: New Movies
/ Stories
As you can see from the movie poster above, the name of the movie I am writing about is Knock Down the House, but I kept thinking that the 1983 song by the Talking Heads, Burning Down the House, would have made a better title. Maybe the filmmakers wanted to call it that, but the…
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Back to December
Prompted By Holidaze
/ Stories
I get very grouchy this time of year. I hate going into any kind of store, because they are invariably playing Christmas music. Even if they avoid the blatantly religious songs, and stick to “Holly Jolly Christmas” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” it’s still a reminder that for this entire month I am…
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It’s A Family Affair
Prompted By Cousins
/ Stories
There were five of us girl cousins who grew up together, my mother’s three daughters, and her sister Daisy’s two. They were my only first cousins, and the only cousins I ever knew. Each of my parents had one sibling, and my father’s sister didn’t have any children. There probably were some second cousins on both…
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We Are the World
Prompted By Charity
/ Stories
We are the world, We are the children, We are the ones who make a brighter day, so let’s start giving. Oh, there’s a choice we’re making, We’re saving our own lives, It’s true we’ll make a better day, just you and me. This song, written by Michael Jackson and sung by an ad hoc…
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Calendar Girl
Prompted By Baby Books
/ Stories
My parents didn’t keep baby books, but they did keep photo albums. The kind with the black construction paper pages. They pasted the pictures in, or else sometimes the pictures were held by those photo corners with adhesive on the back. They made an album for each of their three daughters. At some point, after…
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Baby What a Big Surprise
Prompted By Surprise!
/ Stories
I saw the notice on facebook, of all places, where it had been posted by the mayor of Sacramento, whom I follow. The city had just created an Ethics Commission, and all interested Sacramento residents were invited to apply. So I thought, why not? I found the application online, filled it out, and submitted it…
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The Little Old Lady from Pasadena
Prompted By Ageism
/ Stories
As I often do when I am writing a Retrospect story, I started out by googling “songs about [name of prompt].” For Ageism, I could find almost nothing; apparently it isn’t a topic that songwriters are inspired by. But I did find a reference to “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena” as being the first…
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I’ve Got A Crush on You
Prompted By The Crush
/ Stories
The Gershwin song “I’ve Got A Crush on You” doesn’t really get the crush concept right. The lyrics say “You had such persistence, you wore down my resistance, I fell, and it was swell . . . . I’ve got a crush on you, sweetie pie.” So she’s singing to him after they get together.…
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Woolly Bully
Prompted By Bullying
/ Stories
What is bullying? I struggle with the term. Maybe it’s one of those “I know it when I see it” type of things. Stopbullying.gov, an official government website (it says so!), defines bullying as “unwanted, aggressive behavior among school aged children that involves a real or perceived power imbalance. . . . Bullying includes actions…
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Check It Out
Prompted By Libraries
/ Stories
I would be remiss in my discussion of the Newark Public Library if I did not mention Philip Roth's novella Goodbye Columbus.
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Don’t Do Me Like That
Prompted By Hacks and Scams
/ Stories
The scamming emails seem to come in constantly. Fortunately, they generally go into my spam folder and I never even see them. Here’s one of the most recent ones: Greetings, I was searching through a local business directory when I found your profile. I am Soliciting On-Behalf of my private client who is interested in…
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Pennies From Heaven
Prompted By Nannies and Babysitters
/ Stories
When each of my first two kids was born, I stayed home for a year, and when I went back to the AG’s Office (part-time) they went to a daycare center. That seemed to work pretty well. But with the youngest, we thought it made sense to have someone come to our house, because she…
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Mah Jongg Blues
Prompted By Games People Play
/ Stories
Long-time Retrospect readers may recall my story Bridge Over Troubled Waters about how I played bridge for many years, mostly in high school and college, and my conclusion that I was a much better bridge player when I was stoned. I ended that story with the following passage: “Once I had my first baby, 32 years ago,…
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Parking Rage and Road Kindness
Prompted By Road Rage
/ Stories
My nephew, a New York actor who is currently appearing in Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, recently posted this story on his facebook page. I loved it so much that I wanted to share it here. With his permission, I am reprinting it exactly as he wrote it, along with one of his photos…
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You Need to Calm Down
Prompted By Road Rage
/ Stories
At first I couldn’t think of any experience that would rise to the level of road rage. Annoyance with another driver who did something stupid, sure. Maybe a little cursing under my breath, or an occasional blast on my rather wimpy horn. But nothing that I would really call rage. I joked that I was…
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Bright College Days
Prompted By An Unforgettable Person
/ Stories
Most people associate the word “tutor” with someone hired to give individual remedial instruction in a course that one is having trouble with. However at Harvard, following the model of Oxford and Cambridge, students have tutorials in their field of concentration in their second, third, and fourth years. Sophomore tutorial is in a small group,…
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If You’re Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands
Prompted By Kindergarten
/ Stories
I already knew how to read when I got to kindergarten. I could write my first name in capital letters. I also knew colors and numbers and days of the week. This was partly because my sisters thought it was fun to teach me, and partly because, as the third child in the family, I…
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Who’ll Stop the Rain?
Prompted By Weather
/ Stories
When I was little, Susan and the Rain was one of my favorite books. Of course it was partly because my name is Susan, but also because I hated the rain. Here’s how it starts: Susan Amantha Cottonwood was a little girl who was always good – when the sun…
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Ticket to Ride
Prompted By Woodstock
/ Stories
It is the fiftieth anniversary of Woodstock, and for the past week there have been Woodstock stories everywhere I look. Every newspaper and magazine, print or online, seems to have a story written by someone who was there. PBS aired a new documentary last week subtitled Three Days That Defined a Generation. (Does that title…
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A Whole New World
Prompted By Genealogy
/ Stories
So far, I haven’t had any desire to have my DNA tested, even though so many other people I know are doing it. I don’t really want that information falling into the wrong hands, and more importantly, I don’t think I would find out anything about my ancestry that I don’t already know. However, there’s…
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My Little Corner of the World
Prompted By Neighbors
/ Stories
I always wanted a neighbor that I could talk to over the back fence. You see it in comic strips, TV shows and movies. BFFs who live next door to each other. But I wonder if it ever happens in real life. In my childhood, we knew our neighbors but were not friends with them.…
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Countin’ Flowers on the Wall
Prompted By Boredom
/ Stories
“Shlog dein kup en vant!” This is as close as I can get to what my parents said to me in Yiddish when I was a child, if I ever said “I’m bored, what should I do?” It means “go bang your head against the wall.” It was said lovingly, and of course I knew…
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Everyone’s Gone to the Moon
Prompted By Moon Landing
/ Stories
Sunday, July 20, 1969. “The Eagle has landed.” Hard to believe that it has been fifty years since we heard those words! Yes, I remember watching the moon landing, but my story about it has more questions than answers. Principally, what was I doing in Cambridge that weekend? It was the summer between my freshman…
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Summer in the City
Prompted By Beach Reads
/ Stories
I rarely go to the beach, and when I do, I am generally either working on my suntan (I know, very dangerous, but I still do it) or cooling off in the water. I can’t remember ever bringing a book to the beach either as a child or as an adult. But I do like…
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Smoke on the Water
Prompted By Fireworks
/ Stories
Watching all those colorful explosions shooting through the sky just makes me happy.
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Lyin’ Eyes
Prompted By Honesty
/ Stories
The first time I lied about my age, I was five years old. It was my parents’ idea. Our family was visiting the United Nations in New York – perhaps one of my older sisters was studying it in school – and to get in to the General Assembly gallery at that time you had…
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26 Miles Across the Sea
Prompted By Honeymoon
/ Stories
Twenty-six miles across the sea Santa Catalina is a-waitin’ for me, Santa Catalina, the island of romance, romance, romance, romance. We got married in March, and the big honeymoon we planned was a trip to Kenya on a photo safari with an adventure travel company, plus an additional week in the Seychelle Islands, because my…
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Also Sprach Zarathustra
Prompted By First Dates
/ Stories
A blind date to a boring movie is not a recipe for success
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You Better Shop Around
Prompted By Shopping Local
/ Stories
I grew up in Belleville, New Jersey (1960 population 35,005), in a house on Washington Avenue, the main street of town. Directly across the street was a movie theater, a Shell gas station, and a drugstore. The featured image is the drugstore, and you can see a little bit of the Shell sign on the lefthand…
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I Fought the Law and the Law Won
Prompted By College Majors as Career Gaugers
/ Stories
Before I start my own story, I have to explain how this prompt, College Majors as Career Gaugers, came about. I subscribe to a listserv of members of the class preceding mine at my alma mater, which actively discusses myriad topics on a daily basis. A few months ago, somebody posed the question: did your…
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Across the Universe
Prompted By Social Media Friendships
/ Stories
When I think of social media, the first thing I think of is Facebook. For me, Facebook was always about sharing pictures and bits of news with family and friends who are scattered around the world. Now, in addition, it involves sharing links to articles about the current terrifying political situation. I have never considered…
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You Don’t Mess Around With Gym*
Prompted By PE Pleasures and Perils
/ Stories
Physical Education, or Gym as we called it, was by far my least favorite class in high school. First of all, we had to wear these horrible gymsuits, one-piece numbers that snapped up the front. They were hideous looking things, as you can see from the Featured Image. No girl looked good in them, no…
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Give Me Just A Little More Time
Prompted By Exams
/ Stories
Wow, blue books! So many memories! I considered calling the story “Blank Space” — because there was always a lot more blank space than writing in my blue books — but figured this crowd wouldn’t know the Taylor Swift song, so I went with a 1970 song that applies equally well to my exam-taking experience.…
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Baby You Can Drive My Car
Prompted By The DMV
/ Stories
The driving age in NJ, where I grew up, was 17 for some reason, even though in almost every other state in the union it was 16.
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A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall
Prompted By Cold War Coping
/ Stories
At my elementary school, which I attended from 1956 to 1962, we never hid under our desks or heard the phrase “duck and cover.” We had our own fallout shelter to protect us from the Russians. The school was a large building, three stories plus a basement, which took up (in my memory at least)…
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Pollution
Prompted By Earth Day
/ Stories
In 1965, Tom Lehrer recorded the song “Pollution,” purporting to give advice to a foreign traveler visiting the US. If you visit American city You will find it very pretty Just two things which you must beware Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air. At the time it seemed funny, since usually it…
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Taxman
Prompted By Taxes
/ Stories
Let me tell you how it will be There’s one for you, nineteen for me ‘Cause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman The Beatles, who had grown up poor, weren’t very happy to discover once they were making oodles of money that the British government was going to take most of it. Not sure…
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Poetry in Motion
Prompted By Poetry
/ Stories
There are many poets whose work I cherish. For instance, Robert Frost. I can easily recite all four stanzas of “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” and most of “The Road Not Taken,” although I don’t recall ever intentionally trying to memorize them. I love anything by e. e. cummings. I don’t know any…
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Cake by the Ocean
Prompted By Spring Break
/ Stories
Faithful readers of Retrospect may recall my story on the prompt Beaches, which included memories of two spring break trips I took three decades apart: a 1961 trip with my parents and sisters to Fort Lauderdale shortly after the movie Where the Boys Are came out; and a 1992 trip to Maui with my future second husband…
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Hillary
Prompted By Women We Admire
/ Stories
Hillary. Rodham. Clinton She has been a woman I admire since 1992. There is so much I could say about her, but like the speaker “who needs no introduction” and then gets one anyway, it just doesn’t seem necessary. Everyone knows about her, and all the truths and lies that have been attached to her…
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Back Stabbers
Prompted By Betrayal
/ Stories
They smilin’ in your face All the time they want to take your place The back stabbers. . . . What follows is not the only story of betrayal that has occurred in my life, but let’s just say that it’s the only one that I’m willing to make public. Putting out on the internet…
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Knock Three Times
Prompted By My First Apartment
/ Stories
I lived in my first — and only — apartment building the summer after my sophomore year of college. I had snagged a great summer job working for Houghton Mifflin Publishing Co. in Boston. My dear friend Kit, who was part of my Comstock Hall crowd, had a job as a research assistant for a…
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Willkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome
Prompted By New Beginnings
/ Stories
This might be one of the scariest things I’ve ever done! A new beginning as a website owner/administrator is not something I ever expected. It feels a little like riding on this ferris wheel. When John and Patti announced that Retrospect would cease operations on December 31, 2018, I felt bereft. It had been such…
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Turn, Turn, Turn
Prompted By Turning Points
/ Stories
To everything there is a season. . . . The first time the prompt Turning Points appeared was in August 2016, and I wrote Universe ablaze with changes about the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. That event was a major turning point in my life, setting me on the political course that I have followed ever since.…
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Gifts Are For Giving
Prompted By Gifts
/ Stories
I am not an easy person to buy presents for. I know that, and I discourage family members from buying me things. Because I hardly ever like them. They will invariably be the wrong color, or the wrong size, or the wrong shape, or just not something that is useful to me. Even jewelry, I…
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Homeward Bound
Prompted By Home
/ Stories
This is the house I grew up in, a two-story red brick house with a full attic and basement, on a corner lot in Belleville, New Jersey. My father’s medical office is on the side, you can see the entrance to it on the far right in the picture. My parents moved into this house…
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Sing, Sing A Song
Prompted By Songs We Sang
/ Stories
I grew up singing. My family sang all the time. On holidays and other occasions we would gather around the piano and sing, sometimes in unison, more often taking different parts. In the early years, it was my aunt Daisy who played the piano, but at some point my oldest sister took over that role. If…
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Over the River Again
Prompted By Family
/ Stories
I am reposting the story I wrote for the prompt “Gratitude” two years ago, with updates. I decided to do it this way, rather than just move the old story to this prompt, because this will be my 100th story! Thank you for your indulgence. *** Thanksgiving was always the most special holiday in my family…
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Politics and Poker
Prompted By Politics
/ Stories
Fiorello! is a wonderful musical about New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia (yes, he’s the one for whom the airport is named). It ran on Broadway from November 1959 through October 1961. I went to see it with my mother on Election Day 1960. One of the songs in the musical, “Politics and Poker,” contains…
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Telephone Line
Prompted By Pranks and Practical Jokes
/ Stories
When I was a kid, my friends and I used to love making phony phone calls. I don’t know why it seemed so hilarious, but it did. We would dial a number that we picked at random out of the telephone book. When someone answered, we would say “Is your refrigerator running?” They would say…
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Bows and Flows of Angel Hair
Prompted By Accessorize, Accessorize
/ Stories
Accessories? I have never been into purses or shoes or hats or scarves. I have bought all those things, of course, but only as needed, not in a collecting kind of way. However, in junior high school, I wore bows in my hair almost every day. My coiffure may not have been the angel hair…
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Why Do I Have To Choose
Prompted By Beatles vs Stones
/ Stories
I always thought it was a sillly competition. Why did people expect you to declare allegiance to only one band, the Rolling Stones or the Beatles? I loved them both! I see now that I bought 13 Beatles albums and only 10 Stones albums (and I have photographed both sets on my living room carpet),…
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It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if I Want To
Prompted By Parties
/ Stories
I love parties! I almost always have a great time at them. Certainly college parties are among my fondest memories of those years. But for me, the good ones don’t seem to make for interesting stories. So here’s a story about the worst party of my life. 1966. The drinking age in New Jersey was…
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Be True to Your School
Prompted By Middle School
/ Stories
Middle School. . . . In our day they called it Junior High School. I don’t know when the name was changed, or why, but in any event, I never went to one. My first school was a K-8, and my second school was a 7-12. My town didn’t have a Junior High at that…
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Fame by Proxy
Prompted By Fame
/ Stories
A relative of mine became famous as a result of a combination of factors that could not possibly have been anticipated.
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Magic Carpet Ride
Prompted By 1968
/ Stories
The one year of my life that had the greatest impact on me was definitely 1968.
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Blame It On Mexico
Prompted By Nudity
/ Stories
I am not comfortable with group nudity. I’ve managed to change clothes discreetly in locker rooms and dorm rooms, even while those all around me were letting it all hang out. I have never gone to a nude beach or a nude hot tub party. Sorry, that’s just not me. But there was one time…
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Food, Glorious Food
Prompted By Diets
/ Stories
I have never been on a diet. I don’t say this to brag, just stating a fact. I have no idea how many calories are in anything. I have never read a diet book or listened to a diet guru. I eat whatever I want to, and stop when I feel full. Yet I have…
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Time in a Bottle
Prompted By Vintage Photos
/ Stories
I first saw this photo after my mother died. My oldest sister, who is the repository of all the family photos that my parents had (because she lived the closest), was scanning many pictures and emailing them to my other sister and me for use in the shiva-type services we were each having in our…
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A White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation
Prompted By Prom
/ Stories
This is the story of the prom nobody remembers. Literally. All I know is who I went with and what I wore. Jeff, the boy I had been dating since New Year’s Eve of senior year, was a sophomore at Rutgers, but came home every weekend to see me. So when I asked him to…
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Ooh Baby Baby
Prompted By Babies
/ Stories
In my early twenties I had absolutely no interest in babies. I didn’t find them cute, or interesting, or cuddly. When friends or classmates were showing off their babies, I would of course say Oh your baby is so adorable, but I actually thought they were ugly and noisy and smelly. I certainly didn’t want…
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The Perfect Nanny
Prompted By The Twilight Zone
/ Stories
“The Perfect Nanny” is a song from the movie Mary Poppins, in which the children describe the characteristics they want in a nanny. You must be kind, you must be witty Very sweet and fairly pretty Take us on outings, give us treats Sing songs, bring sweets We were lucky enough to find our own perfect…
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Paperback Writer
Prompted By What We Read
/ Stories
As a child I was a voracious reader, devouring all the book series that were popular at that time — The Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames, Sue Barton, and Honey Bunch and Norman. Of these five, the only one that seems to have survived is Nancy Drew. Maybe a girl detective has more staying…
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Street Fighting [Wo]man
Prompted By Question Authority
/ Stories
I was seventeen years old and I was ready to learn how to be a revolutionary.
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As Time Goes By
Prompted By That Was Then, This Is Now
/ Stories
Then: Kneeling down in front of the ironing board to iron my hair, so that it will be pin straight, as the fashion dictates. Sometimes burning my left hand (which is holding the hairbrush) with the tip of the iron in my right hand, because I can’t see what I’m doing. Now: What’s an ironing board? Electric…
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Go Tell Aunt Rhody
Prompted By Aunts & Uncles
/ Stories
Daisy was a wonderful singer and taught me many songs, including "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" and "Go Tell Aunt Rhody."
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Scenes from an Italian Restaurant
Prompted By Restaurants
/ Stories
Billy Joel probably never ate at the Italian restaurant my family favored when I was young, since he grew up in New York, not New Jersey, but he must have had a similar place in mind when he wrote the song “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.” Don’s 21 was located on McCarter Highway in Newark,…
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Celluloid Heroes
Prompted By Best Picture
/ Stories
“Everybody’s a dreamer, everybody’s a star,” sang the Kinks in their 1972 song “Celluloid Heroes.” So true. I nominate this song to be the permanent theme song of the Academy Awards show. First movie: Sayonara. As far as I remember, this was my first movie in a theatre, although I probably saw others on television…
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What’s Goin’ On
Prompted By Watergate
/ Stories
“What do you remember about Watergate?” asks this week’s prompt. I am finding it a very difficult question to answer. Right now I could tell you everything that happened from the night of the break-in at Democratic Headquarters on June 17, 1972 (two days after I graduated from college), to the resignation of Richard Nixon…
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Why must I be-e a teen-A-ger in love?
Prompted By Teenager in Love
/ Stories
Every time I have seen the phrase “teenager in love” – starting with the first time this prompt appeared in Retrospect two years ago – I have read it as teen-A-ger, with the accent on the second syllable, rather than TEEN-ager, the usual pronunciation, with the accent on the first syllable. In contrast, if the…
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Too Much Time on My Hands (Styx)
Prompted By Retirement
/ Stories
I loved being a lawyer. I can't think of any other career I would have rather had. Except for being a rock 'n' roll singer - that would have been the best.
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We Can Work It Out
Prompted By Roommates
/ Stories
Sometimes you can work it out, sometimes you can’t. I’ve had a lot of roommates, starting as a 17-year-old college freshman, and ending when I bought my first house at age 27. CAVEAT: This story is way too long to sustain anyone’s interest, so I advise reading maybe about half of it. Once I started…
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What Did You Learn in School Today?
Prompted By A Year in the Life
/ Stories
In September 1958 I had just turned seven, and I was in Mrs. Smith's second-grade class
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Livin’ La Vida Loca
Prompted By Travels
/ Stories
Memorial Day to the Fourth of July, a good length of time for a vacation
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You Say You Want a Revolution
Prompted By Strikes
/ Stories
A companion piece to Khati's story entitled 1969.
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Beechwood 4-5789
Prompted By Technology
/ Stories
We were early adopters of email, and also of cellphones. Our first email account was through CompuServe, and our user name was a string of numbers that we didn’t even get to pick, so for me they were impossible to remember. My 32-year-old daughter Sabrina, however, can still recite that string of numbers, twenty-some years…
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Different Drum
Prompted By Being Different
/ Stories
In the summer of 1970 the Harvard Glee Club and Radcliffe Choral Society had the wonderful opportunity to sing two concerts at Tanglewood, with Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa. It was an exciting time. We spent the week before the concerts living at Tanglewood, with many rehearsals but also quite a bit of free time.…
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The Way We Were
Prompted By Reunions
/ Stories
I am a reunion junkie! I love them, and it always makes me sad when friends choose not to attend. Last month, October 2017, I had two incredible reunions two weeks apart — my college 45th and my law school 40th. I was on the planning committees for both reunions, worked hard to make them…
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Teach Your Children
Prompted By Gender Roles
/ Stories
For my parents, the gender roles were clear. My mother was in charge of the house and the family, my father dealt with the outside world and earned the money to support us. He might have disagreed with some of the decisions she made regarding us kids, but he would have no more told her…
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They Say It’s Your Birthday
Prompted By Birthdays
/ Stories
My birthday falls at the end of August, which is a lovely time of year, but a terrible time to have a birthday when you are young.
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Talkin’ ’bout my generation
Prompted By Generation Gap
/ Stories
The Who, in their song My Generation, famously said “Hope I die before I get old.”
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Did You Ever Have to Make up Your Mind?
Prompted By The Road Not Taken
/ Stories
It was 1974, and after two years of working at the US Department of Transportation, I was ready to quit my job and go to law school. I had applied to several schools on the East Coast, as well as UC Berkeley and two other California schools that I didn’t know much about. Those last…
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Love That Dirty Water
Prompted By First Day of School
/ Stories
My oldest sister went off to Radcliffe College in September 1962, just as I started seventh grade. I was fascinated with Radcliffe – the apple trees with circular benches around them in Radcliffe Yard, the nine old homey-looking brick dorms around the lush green Quad – and with the bustling Harvard Square area. It seemed…
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The End of the World
Prompted By 9/11
/ Stories
Looking back at August-September 2001 brings to mind the opening of A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The two weeks prior to what we now just refer to as 9/11 contained some of the best times of my life, and then, of course, the…
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Highway to Hell
Prompted By Quick Take: How Is This Still a Thing?
/ Stories
How is the Ku Klux Klan still a thing? In old movies we see those white-sheeted ridiculous-looking figures riding on horseback through the countryside, carrying fiery torches, setting the shacks of poor black people ablaze and leaving burning crosses to light up the night. But this is in the past, right? Wa-a-a-ay in the past!…
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I Will Survive
Prompted By Illness
/ Stories
On March 10, 2008, I had my annual mammogram. Never a pleasant experience, but tolerable, and I dutifully went every year without giving it much thought. That year was different. A few days afterwards the imaging center called me and said they wanted to do another mammogram of my right breast, so on March 20…
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Hooray for Hollywood
Prompted By What We Watched
/ Stories
The first time this prompt, “What We Watched,” appeared, I wrote a story about the television shows I loved growing up, TV shows of my youth. That was the very first story I posted on Retrospect, and it started me on a wonderful adventure which has continued through 60 stories so far, with many more yet to…
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The Great Pretender
Prompted By Theater
/ Stories
Inspired by John Zussman's republishing his story from the 2017 prompt "Let's Put On a Show."
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A Whiter Shade of Pale
Prompted By Summer of Love
/ Stories
1967. The Summer of Love was the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. I was going to turn sixteen at the end of August — which meant that I had been claiming to be sixteen for months. I thought I was very sophisticated and wise. Retrospect readers may have already seen…
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Something to Talk About
Prompted By Concerts
/ Stories
Story from 2017, moved to this prompt in response to John's story Great Performances.
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Scarlet Ribbons
Prompted By Lessons
/ Stories
In the summer of 1965 I decided I wanted to learn how to play the guitar. I was turning 14 at the end of the summer, and it was my second year at a leftist work camp called Lincoln Farm. One of my favorite aspects of camp was the singing we did — at campfires,…
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Remember (Walking in the Sand)
Prompted By Beaches
/ Stories
Memories of three beach trips that I hadn't thought about for years triggered by a Retrospect prompt.
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Father and Daughter
Prompted By Father's Day
/ Stories
Paul Simon’s song “Father and Daughter” starts out “If you leap awake / In the mirror of a bad dream…” This reminds me of my favorite story about my father, which I have told to my children numerous times. When I was little, I had a recurring nightmare about a witch chasing me. I think…
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Graduation Mix Tape
Prompted By Graduation Advice
/ Stories
Giving the graduates a mix tape of advice
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Draft Dodger Rag
Prompted By The Draft & Vietnam
/ Stories
Memorial Day weekend in Sacramento is most notable for the Dixieland Jazz Jubilee, which has occurred every year since 1974. It is an amazing four days of music and fun, with bands from all over the country and the world who make the pilgrimage to northern California to play traditional jazz. I didn’t discover it until…
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When I’m Sixty-Four
Prompted By Aging
/ Stories
I first published this story six years ago for the prompt "Too Young to be This Old."
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Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress
Prompted By In My Mother's Closet
/ Stories
Mainly I remember my mother’s closet as a great place to play hide and seek. It was a big walk-in closet shaped like an L, so you could go around the corner to hide and a seeker might just look in the doorway and not see you. There was also a little door that led…
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You’ve Got A Friend
Prompted By Friendship
/ Stories
When I was little — practically from birth — I had a best friend named Bette. Her parents were good friends with my parents, and she had two older sisters whose ages roughly corresponded to the ages of my older sisters. Our two families rented houses next door to each other at Lake Hopatcong every summer.…
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Stray Cat Strut
Prompted By Pets
/ Stories
It was the end of the summer of 1992. Ed and I had bought a beautiful big old house and moved into it with my two children, seven-year-old Sabrina and four-year-old Ben. It seemed like the right time to get a kitten. We knew if we took the kids with us to the animal shelter,…
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Blinded by the Light
Prompted By Science
/ Stories
I must confess that I have never been very interested in science. Conversations on scientific topics tend to make my eyes glaze over. My only good science experience was in first grade. We had a lovely teacher named Miss Garcelon, who had just graduated from teachers college, and we were her first class. She decided, for…
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Tradition
Prompted By Faith
/ Stories
Faith, for me, is a complicated topic. As I said in an earlier Retrospect story, I mostly don’t believe in God. But for some reason I’m not quite ready to rule out the possibility entirely. For instance, all through my years in school, when I was nervous about an exam, I would talk to God, saying “if…
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Take Me Out to the Ball Game
Prompted By Big Fan
/ Stories
My house is across the street from a park with several baseball diamonds, and around the corner from a school whose baseball field and snack shack are the headquarters for the local Little League. Every year on opening day there is a parade that goes past my house, with pickup trucks full of screaming little…
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With a Little Help From My Friends
Prompted By Altered States
/ Stories
Summer 1967 It’s the Summer of Love in San Francisco Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. Meanwhile, across the country, A high school girl, not quite sixteen, End-of-summer birthday, Tall and thin, with curly hair she irons straight, And glasses which she seldom wears Feels too old to go to camp, Off to a summer…
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Bridge Over Troubled Waters
Prompted By Toys & Games
/ Stories
When I was growing up, my family had a ton of board games, and a finished room in the basement where we kept them all and played them with our friends or with each other. Chiefly I remember Sorry and Chutes & Ladders when I was really young, and then Monopoly and Clue when I was…
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I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar
Prompted By Women's Lib
/ Stories
Posting this on International Women's Day!
* * * * * * *
I was a feminist long before I knew such a word existed.
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Stayin’ Alive
Prompted By Dance Crazes
/ Stories
Is it okay to be frivolous in these dark times?
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Steal Away (Into the Night)
Prompted By In Trouble
/ Stories
Steal This Book, said Abbie Hoffman
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The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face
Prompted By The First Time
/ Stories
This song demanded that I write about it
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This Story Is Not About Cooking
Prompted By Cooking
/ Stories
This story may or may not turn out to be about cooking. Mainly it is about my mother, who, as I write, is lying in a hospital bed holding on to life by only the slenderest of threads. By the time you read this, the thread may have snapped. But she will always be a…
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We Shall Overcome
Prompted By View from the Mountaintop
/ Stories
Usually I write the story first and then look for a song for the title. This time I picked the song first. It is the third week in January, the week between Martin Luther King’s birthday and the ending of the Obama Administration. I feel like it is the last week before our country descends into…
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Lead Us Not into Social Media
Prompted By Temptation
/ Stories
Facebook. Such a silly thing when it started, just a way for college students to check each other out, find out if someone was available or in a relationship, whatever. When it expanded beyond those with an “edu” email address and became available to all, I joined, at the invitation of a friend who wanted me…
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Those Were the Days, My Friend
Prompted By Grandparents & Grandchildren
/ Stories
Readers of Retrospect may recall my maternal grandparents from two other stories, No Way To Say Goodbye, about my grandfather’s death, and Which Side Are You On?, in which I discussed their flight from the Cossacks and their search for the American Dream. They were a significant part of my childhood, living with my parents, my sisters, and me in our…
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Auld Lang Syne
/ Stories
I first published this story three years ago, on the prompt New Beginnings. Since it only got 3 comments, I’m thinking most of you never saw it. So here it is again. I’m feeling a little more optimistic now about 2020 than I was three years ago about 2017, but our country is not out…
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Stardust… golden… caught in the devil’s bargain
Prompted By Be Careful What You Wish For
/ Stories
I’m writing this on the day after the Electoral College met and actually, officially, chose that awful man to be the next President of the United States. In the six weeks since the election I have been wishing for something to happen to prevent this from occurring. First I wished (and confidently believed) that the…
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This Little Light of Mine
Prompted By Traditions
/ Stories
Chanukah has always been my favorite holiday. Not because of the gifts — my parents actually gave us our gifts on Dec. 25th when the rest of our friends were getting theirs — but because I loved lighting the candles, singing the traditional songs, playing dreidel, and eating Chanukah gelt (chocolate circles wrapped in gold…
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The beauty, the splendor, the wonder of my hair
Prompted By Hair
/ Stories
The musical Hair opened on Broadway in April 1968, and I saw it some time that spring with my friend Amy, who lived in Manhattan. Amy had been my roommate the previous summer at a program for high school students at Syracuse University. It was Amy who first introduced me to marijuana, so it was…
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Over the River and Through the Woods
Prompted By An Attitude of Gratitude
/ Stories
Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday.
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Which Side Are You On?
Prompted By The American Dream
/ Stories
All four of my grandparents came to this country around 1900 from the area we loosely referred to as Russia, although borders were fluid then. My grandfathers were leaving to avoid serving in the czar’s army, and they were all fleeing from Cossacks and pogroms and the terrors of anti-Semitism. They settled on the Lower…
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Eve of Destruction
Prompted By Politics
/ Stories
I began this story on Monday, November 7. Here was my first paragraph: I am starting to write this the night before the election. The anxiety and suspense are palpable. Perhaps by the time I finish it, we will have elected our first woman President. I then wrote a few paragraphs about the political views of my…
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No Way to Say Goodbye, part two
Prompted By The Great Beyond
/ Stories
How do you tell your teenage children that their father has died?
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No Way To Say Goodbye
Prompted By The Great Beyond
/ Stories
My first experience with death was my grandfather’s, when I was eleven years old. Both of my maternal grandparents (Nana and Papa) lived with us in our big brick house in New Jersey, and had for as long as I can remember — possibly since before I was born. My grandmother had one of the…
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Monster Mash
Prompted By Halloween
/ Stories
Celebrating Halloween through the years with costumes and candy.
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To Sing In Perfect Harmony
Prompted By In the Band
/ Stories
I don’t remember a time when I couldn’t read music. I must have learned at about the same time I learned to read words, around three years old. It has always been a part of my life. I took piano lessons and then oboe lessons, but the thing I always liked the best was singing.…
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The I Hate to Cook Book
Prompted By What We Ate
/ Stories
My mother was not much of a cook. She made dinner every night for 30 years (except for the occasional restaurant meal), and then, when my father retired and the kids were all grown up and gone, she never cooked again. She certainly never imbued any of her three daughters with a love of cooking,…
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We Are Family
Prompted By Parenthood
/ Stories
When I was a little girl, I always imagined that when I grew up I would have three children. That’s how many there were in my family, and it seemed like just the right number to me. However, I vowed, they would be close enough in age that they could all hang out and have fun…
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Launching my firstborn
Prompted By First Day of School
/ Stories
Instead of a heart-to-heart talk, we sang along with a "classic rock" station at the top of our lungs.
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Born to be Wild (in the snow)
Prompted By Something Wild
/ Stories
This story was originally written for the prompt "Something Wild."
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Nine to Five
Prompted By Working
/ Stories
When I graduated from college, I was pretty sure I wanted to go to law school eventually, but I was VERY sure that I wanted to take some time off from school first. I was sick of writing papers and taking exams and always having some assignment hanging over my head to make me feel…
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The End of the Innocence
Prompted By Assassination
/ Stories
On this particular November Friday, we were sitting in home ec class learning how to make salad dressing.
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So Much in Common
Prompted By How We Met
/ Stories
I had met someone who seemed like the love of my life a couple of years earlier, and it hadn’t worked out (although it would when the time was right). On the rebound from him, I started dating the handsomest guy in the entire Attorney General’s Office, who had already slept with every other attractive single woman…
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Suitcases without wheels
Prompted By Good Riddance
/ Stories
Why did it take so long for someone to come up with the idea of putting wheels on suitcases? I can remember so many trips, not only in my childhood but in my young adulthood as well, that involved lugging heavy suitcases that I could barely pick up. You might think this would have encouraged…
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Universe ablaze with changes
Prompted By Turning Points
/ Stories
A birth, a death, a national election, or even someone new that you meet by chance, can turn your life upside down and make it so much better or worse.
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My 1966 Plymouth Valiant convertible
Prompted By My First Car
/ Stories
My parents bought the car in the fall of 1965. It was a 1966 model, and they custom-ordered it with all the features they (and I) wanted. I was 14 years old, a sophomore in high school, and the age to get a driver’s license in New Jersey was 17, so I clearly wasn’t going…
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In The Summertime
Prompted By Camp
/ Stories
Summer camp was a major part of my childhood experience. Not only the eight weeks I spent there each summer, but the letters back and forth to camp friends for the other ten months of the year. We poured out our hearts to each other in ways that we would never do with friends at home.…
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On the Road Again
Prompted By Travel
/ Stories
Bits and pieces of many trips lodged in my memory.
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Such Devoted Sisters
Prompted By Siblings
/ Stories
“Sisters, sisters, there were never such devoted sisters.” This 1954 Irving Berlin song was sung by Rosemary Clooney in the movie White Christmas, and my sisters and I learned to sing it at an early age. And we are devoted, it’s not just a song lyric. I feel incredibly lucky to have my two sisters. As I…
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Nice Day for a White Wedding
Prompted By Ceremony
/ Stories
Whenever I hear the term "white wedding" now, the Billy Idol song starts running through my head.
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Up, Up and Away
Prompted By Graduation
/ Stories
The girls wore long gowns and white gloves, and the boys wore tuxedos. The girls also carried bouquets of long-stemmed roses in colors that were coordinated with our gowns.
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The Milk Bottle
Prompted By Those We Miss
/ Stories
I was born on my father's 42nd birthday. He always said that I was the best birthday present he ever got.
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Law school and basketball
Prompted By Sports
/ Stories
How basketball saved my sanity in law school.
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Rock and Roll Never Forgets
Prompted By What We Listened To
/ Stories
Sixties and Seventies music is still the best!
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Maybe I’m Amazed
Prompted By My First Paycheck
/ Stories
The summer before college I had a job that changed my entire life. If only it had changed the nation's history as well.
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Hitchin’ A Ride
Prompted By Dangerous Deeds
/ Stories
Two college girls on a somewhat risky summer adventure.
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Modern Dance Lessons
Prompted By Lessons
/ Stories
Looking back at modern dance lessons in Manhattan, and the drive through the Holland Tunnel to get there.
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Sadie Hawkins Dance
Prompted By Teenager in Love
/ Stories
A freshman girl is daring enough to ask a senior boy to the Sadie Hawkins Dance.
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The Culotte Rebellion
Prompted By What We Wore
/ Stories
What happened when a new principal tried to impose a dress code in a high school where the students wouldn't follow anyone else's rules.
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TV shows of my youth
Prompted By TV That Inspired Me
/ Stories
The three TV shows that were an important part of my childhood, all of whose theme songs I can still easily sing from memory.
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