Suprise Me

I first wrote this story for the prompt “Finding Your Tribe” on March 14, 2020, just before the start of the pandemic, and added an addendum as Massachusetts shut down the next week, then came back last year. Our conductor, Rick Travers, starts every season (I joined this chorus 20 years ago) by saying the… Read More

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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… Read More

My uncle was an old-school, small-town newspaperman.  Read More

Outpatient The humanitarian crisis in Ukraine is heartbreaking as millions flee their homes and we watch helplessly on the TV news. At the turn of the 20th century,  with the Jewish influx of the time,  both my maternal and paternal grandparents emigrated to the States from Eastern Europe,  my father’s parents from Ukraine. They all… Read More

If only the fiftieth anniversary remembrances could restore the initial perceptions that the first ventures into space evoked. Read More

Hands down, though, my best reconnecting project was, at age fifty, finding all the kids who were in my sixth grade class.  Read More

Although I wish it were not so, I realize there are three areas where I have done things I swore I'd never do. Read More

Revelations  Fame well deserved came to a young African American choreographer one night in 1960 when he premiered a new work at the 92nd St Y.  The choreographer was 29 year-old Alvin Ailey,  and the piece was Revelations. Inspired by what Ailey called blood memories of his rural Texas childhood,  and by Negro spirituals,  gospel,… Read More

My father joined the Army Air Corps in January, 1941, a full 11 months BEFORE Pearl Harbor. There was no separate Air Force at this time, it was still a division of the Army. He longed to be part of something bigger than himself. He had worked for the Chevrolet division of General Motors since… Read More