Suprise Me

My protests at San Jose State. After two years at California’s very conservative college, Cal Poly SLO, I went to San Jose State to get a more complete education, including some political action . Read More

At Burger King, we ate with our hands! Read More

It was a June night of thunderstorms in central New Jersey Read More

“There would have been no rescue here!” The fire marshal held my arm as fiercely as my gaze, neither of us paying attention to the breast milk leaking across my shirt. I tore my eyes away from his and tried again to look at the house, still reeking of wet char, a crazy perimeter of crime tape separating the ugly remains of our home from the gorgeous June morning. Read More

The Wheat Field My grandparents emigrated from eastern Europe,  and my parents lived through a world war – my father sent overseas while my mother worked for the Army on the homefront.  (See Parkchester, Celebrate Me Home) And like all families there were skeletons in the closet,  and there were suicides on both sides that… Read More

He would hold the instrument behind his back in his left hand, the bow behind his back in the right, and play. Once he had your attention, he would proceed to lie down on the living room carpet and continue, with no loss of rhythm or resonance Read More

Connection is the lifeblood of civilization, I think. It has become more apparent in the past year when we have been so separated from one another because of the pandemic. Loneliness, grief, depression have made life all but intolerable for so many of us. I am someone who enjoys her own company, but I do… Read More

...although the time shifts of DST have been regular occurrences my entire life, only since 2012 have they become somewhat important to me. Read More

Funerals were forbidden when I was growing up. They were mysterious events my parents attended with other adults. My first introduction to this final rite of passage was my grandfather Philip Krut’s funeral on May 2, 1972. I was 26 years old and the mother of a one-year-old. Did I attend alone? Were my husband… Read More

Most people associate the word “tutor” with someone hired to give individual remedial instruction in a course that one is having trouble with. However at Harvard, following the model of Oxford and Cambridge, students have tutorials in their field of concentration in their second, third, and fourth years. Sophomore tutorial is in a small group,… Read More