Suprise Me

She never said much directly but she exemplified values that I carry with me.  She was a single parent in the early 1950’s.  She was a working mother when no other mothers (I knew) worked outside the house.  No car?  Take buses when they were segregated and we were the only white people on board.… Read More

Jamaica Plain housing project — age 3, going on 4 Read More

Baby Shoes I’m not the sentimental type,  but when our son outgrew his first pair of baby shoes I decided to have them bronzed – separately. I gave one shoe to my mother-in-law who was then a widow,  and the other shoe to my parents. Years later when my mother-in-law died we took back her… Read More

A 1971 Chevy Belair.   Fire Engine Red.   That was my first car.  My wife and I married at the end of junior year in college.   We moved my things from my dorm room to the married student housing using the big basket on my bicycle.  My parents told us they would buy us a car… Read More

We visited the library at least once a week. I especially loved the Montclair (Oakland CA) branch which is contained in the cutest little house, in a lovely tree lined street. Read More

Although there are many authorities in the field of autism, the two individuals who helped me the most were parents, who just happened to be there at the right time. Read More

Misspelled words always jump off the page for me. How lucky I am. Spelling problems are primarily peculiar to English language, based on its strength of incorporating foreign words. My Russian instructors said that spelling bees would make no sense for Russian speakers, but that indicating where the accent goes on a particular word is… Read More

I had a vague familiarity with the digeridoo and some of the paintings. What to expect? Read More

My husband only occasionally engaged in DIY projects with me “supervising,” but we did live for 45 years in a house built in 1911. And we loved our old house, despite its frequent need for repairs. Read More

We were jet-lagged but happy to be in Paris in spring again. But the first full day we were there, instead of wandering the streets, taking in tulips and new leaves and La Vie en Rose, my husband and I were pounding the cement catacomb labyrinth under the Gare de Lyon. We wanted a week-long… Read More