Suprise Me

A normal day shattered by disaster. Read More

Three-Ring Circus A working woman who’s also a wife and mother can often feel like a juggler in a three-ring circus. I was working at a job I loved when I discovered I was  pregnant,  and I happily applied for a maternity leave to start two weeks before the baby was due.   (See My Brown-Eyed… Read More

The Cafe Recently at a neighborhood cafe I saw an attractive older couple deep in conversation,  their hands touching on the table.  (See West Side Story)    Both wore wedding rings,  but their body language told me they weren’t married to each other.  I’ll never know their backstory so I imaged this one for them.… Read More

When we got to reciting the ten plagues during our Zoom seder, I know all of us were thinking about an eleventh one that kept us apart this year. Read More

She had been taken to the ER after attempting suicide, and would be in there for some days. Would we take care of her dog? Read More

  Back in the annals of hair history (say, the fifties and sixties), showing dark roots was considered tacky, slovenly. It went hand-in-hand with wearing matted, fuzzy slippers to the grocery store, a cigarette bobbing between lips smeared a garish orangey-pink. Then, that same look became an actual, sought-after hair style, sexy and young – the reverse ombré (well, minus the slippers and bobbing cig). Now, with the closure of hair salons due to the need for social distancing, a new take on the reverse ombré is having its day. Rather than dark roots on light, it’s light roots topping any shade under the sun.  Read More

I don’t really believe in “ex” friends. There is an ebb and flow to friendships, but once established, they can usually be revived, even if dormant. Some can be intense for a while, then circumstances change – one of the parties moves away, changes jobs, or life interferes (I have seen an instance where politics… Read More

My mother always had a fondness for the scroll of hand-painted figures, dressed in traditional Chinese clothes, carrying produce or hawking other wares.  They were framed in pieces and hung on the wall along with other mementoes from her time in Peking (now Beijing) in the late 1940’s.  She lived in a neighborhood of classic… Read More

  Close calls can be close only because of a chance occurrence, thought, or action. Like the so-called “Butterfly Effect” they often yield their own legacy, and in my father’s case, raise questions in my mind as to luck, responsibility, and personal values. When I was a young teen, my father related, as best I… Read More

Comedy, for me, is reified in the Animal Crackers scene when madcap Captain Spaulding (Groucho Marx) steps away from staid Mrs. Rittenhouse (Margaret Dumont) and  Mrs. Whitehead (Margaret Irving) saying: “Pardon me while I have a strange interlude.”  You know, recently I’ve favored cremation over burial, but burial’s preferable if I can have Groucho’s line carved… Read More