Suprise Me

I was 18 going on 19 my parents didn’t know I was going to Woodstock until they saw the cover of Life Magazine with me on the cover dancing naked in the mud at Woodstock. Anyway all the posters say 3 days but it was 4 days cuz Jimi played Monday morning and if you… Read More

My father was the youngest of eight children, my mother, the youngest of four and I am their youngest. That makes me the youngest in a large generation of cousins, some old enough to be my own parent. We are a diverse group of people, yet we all get along, have each others’ backs and… Read More

The plan was to recruit male volunteers to be “sold”, for a term of some hours, at a “slave auction”.  It was 1967, in the middle of civil rights protests. Read More

The Great Pickleball Noise War I was an adult when I started playing tennis seriously,  but try as I might to ratchet up my game I seemed to have plateaued at intermediate level 3.  I was too good to enjoy playing with beginners,  and not good enough to play with advanced players who certainly didn’t… Read More

There was a phone with buttons for hold and intercom, and a blocky computer console sitting squarely in the middle of the desk.  I think it was a Dell.  The font was clunky and there were no graphics.  This was my first computer.  Read More

At last I was successfully disentangling from a bad relationship with an incipiently psychotic partner and needed to move out, now.  A colleague at work turned out to be the landlady of an available place, not far from our community health clinic, and I grabbed it. Read More

The 1960s were a time of political and social turmoil in the US, caused mainly by our involvement in an unpopular war in Vietnam. But there were other reasons, too, among them the rise in marijuana use by high-school and college students. Read More

Overture.  The Middletown Ct. Police Station—Bartok’s Sonata for two pianos and percussion. Before beginning my job as a substitute teacher, I traveled to the police department for a fingerprint security check.  The officer, a large friendly African American interviewed me. “Where will you be teaching?” “Middletown High School.” “Oh,” he warningly replied. “Do you know… Read More

No one had prepared me for a darkened classroom. Read More

Of course, the feud’s origin dated back decades before the pillow incident. Read More