Suprise Me

My Brown-Eyed Girl I wear reading glasses, and have had the requisite cataract surgeries,   yet over the years I haven’t given much thought to my eyeglasses or to my changing vision.   But I have thought about the color of my eyes. In Rogers and Hammerstein’s musical masterpiece Carousel, the carnival barker Billy Bigelow soliloquizes about… Read More

This is more about books and reading and being a weird little kid than about any single book. I was a nerd. A geek. A prototypical Poindexter (a nickname I was actually saddled with for a time). Books didn’t beat me up the way other kids did, so I loved them with all my heart… Read More

Smokey Bear had nothing on us as we learned not only the way to build a proper setting for a campfire but also how to extinguish our campfire. No trees or animals would suffer as a result of a Girl Scout’s carelessness! Read More

When I was a child, we traveled mostly to visit relatives and stayed with them. Starting in 1959, we did spend one week in August for five summers up in Charlevoix, a very nice resort on Lake Michigan in northern Michigan. We stayed in The Schutts Guest House, a large house with a broad lawn… Read More

Yes, I know, “Yesterday” isn’t on “Rubber Soul”, but this is the only original Beatles album I own. My mother didn’t approve of me listening to that sort of music, so I had to sneak it, by plugging my ear phones into my transistor radio. How could you not love the infectious upbeat, cute guys… Read More

in spite of the King's precautions, the princess, who is described as a free spirit, stumbles into...someone working at a spindle. The spindle draws a few drops of her blood... Read More

Save the Date My husband is an awful procrastinator,  but not me.   On the contrary,  I’m compulsive and sometimes I act TOO soon,  which I’ve learned can be just as problematic. There was the time I got a save-the-date for the out-of-town,  black-tie wedding of a friend’s son to be held on a date… Read More

For my mama on her 67th Birthday My Mama taught me When I was 5 weeks old, my father was killed in a car accident, my mama tried not to be sad when she nursed me, so I would not be sad, my mama taught me: Today is the day- to laugh, to learn, to… Read More

I am the second born of a set of identical twins. Does our birth order – he (Twin A) older, I (Twin B) younger – make a difference? Did it ever? If I recall, it made a difference with Cain and Abel. And my father always said that the ancient Romans considered the second born… Read More

There I am, waiting for my shampoo to begin, when my sister emerges from behind the curtain at the back of the salon. Read More