Suprise Me

It was the dark winter solstice of December 2020.  Everything was shut down because of COVID, and vaccines were a mere glimmer.  Life was suspended.  Work had stopped abruptly one day in March—I was too old to risk showing up in person, and virtual options were poor—so de facto retirement came more suddenly than I… Read More

The Brown family, a farming family with roots in the American Revolution, invited my family to watch the McCarthy hearings on television. We didn’t have a TV and, like most of the established families in our little Massachusetts town, the Browns wanted us to know they didn’t like Joe McCarthy and his witch hunt one… Read More

Understanding and respect can go a long way toward developing a bridge to peace. Read More

Members of my family share a long and celebrated history of playing for royalty and heads of state. We are not exactly court jesters, but we come close. My Buckingham Palace event is one more gig on a long list of fancy-pants musical soirees. 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

I’ll take a clean, business-like, functioning, reliable, no nostalgia Hilton Garden Inn anytime/anywhere. Read More

Sometimes it’s not who you are, it’s who you know… I grew up in rural Western Pennsylvania, Beaver County.  My mother worked at the Beaver County Courthouse, she was a clerk in the tax office where all taxes, including motor vehicle, were collected. One sunny afternoon just after my junior year in college, I heard… Read More

Wherein I discuss parallel parking as well as a stint on the Attorney General's Office Parking Committee. Read More

Steve Martin’s role as the dentist in Little Shop of Horrors captured how many of us feel about going to the dentist. Read More

I have never been much of a prankster. I don’t like having them played on me, usually don’t find them funny and am not creative in thinking them up. So this is a difficult prompt for me. I never created mischief on Halloween, or any other night, for that matter. The closest I came was… Read More