Suprise Me

To get to Martha’s Vineyard, an island in the Atlantic Ocean, 7 miles off the coast of Massachusetts, one must drive on various types of roads and take a scheduled ferry. It has been a tourist destination since the mid-1800s when people arrived by horse carts. Now there are highways for much of the drive.… Read More

The gradual decline of print newspapers is a great sadness to me. While I do read the news online, it is not the same. I can only describe it as a loss of serendipity. Read More

In so many ways, the senior living experience was a reincarnation of middle school. Men caused major mean girl issues, even for women in their eighties and nineties. Read More

One of my favorite walking activities involves shutting my eyes for as long as I can.  I choose sidewalks with grass on both sides, or smooth trails that are straight with no stones or potholes.  The experience of temporary blindness allows me to enter the environment with no focus, no distractions except for the wind… Read More

We spent the day before in Ogunquit, ME. I walked the beach with my dad and got a bit sunburnt. We had to drive 1,000 miles to get me from Huntington Woods, MI to Waltham, MA for the start of my freshman year at Brandeis University. It was September, 1970. Campuses across the US were… Read More

In the early 60’s, I had a morning newspaper route. In five years, only a couple people didn’t pay their subscription. Honor was still a virtue. But one man didn’t pay and then moved. On collection days when I knocked on his door, even with his car in the driveway, no one answered. I was… Read More

Story from 2017, moved to this prompt in response to John's story Great Performances. Read More

I can still hear the shout…”MAKE IT SHORT”…coming from the kitchen from my mother to the barber who was about to give me a haircut upstairs in my bedroom. I was 10 years old, home sick in bed, and I couldn’t go to the barbershop. But that didn’t stop my mother from arranging for the… Read More

Good Causes When we moved to Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood in the mid-1970s I was a young mother on maternity leave at home with a one-year-old,  and every day,  weather permitting,  we’d find ourselves  across the street in Carl Schurz Park.   The park was named in 1910 for the German-born Secretary of the Interior at… Read More

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… Read More