Suprise Me

Dan and I have always had specific design ideas. They have changed as our tastes have grown more sophisticated and our financial means also grown and changed through the years, but we always knew what we liked. We married young and started our life together with very limited resources. My father gave us some money… Read More

I grew up in rural New England and, altho my dad was a scientist who worked in Boston, I spent my school years in a small public school that embraced equal measures of college prep students and shop kids. Many of my friends were the sons and daughters of farmers and mechanics. Out of family… Read More

Precious  In 2010 the Oscar for Best Picture went to The Hurt Locker,  but in my book the award should have gone to one I was glad to watch a second time –  the nominated film Precious.   The film,  based on the young adult novel Push,  starred the amazing Gabourey Sidibe as Precious the… Read More

Rock Concert When our son was 12 we took him to New Jersey’s Meadowlands Arena to his first rock concert – a stop on Bon Jovi’s  Slippery When Wet Tour. Later he told us Bon Jovi wasn’t really a cool band,  and going to a rock concert with your folks wasn’t cool at all.  … Read More

In westerns, Sarah was always the “good woman”, never a dance hall gal. Read More

(Note: this prompt first came up on July 23, 2018, which is when this story was originally written and published. I have added some new anecdotes and made some edits. It should be noted that as a high school teenager, I was not paying much attention to the political world around me.) The radio alarm… Read More

I'd like to say that it was a summer out of a Ray Bradbury tale... Read More

It is so true that, as Andy Warhol famously said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” During the summers of my freshman and sophomore years of high school, I indulged my interest in theater by becoming an apprentice at Northland Playhouse in the newly built Northland Mall in a suburb of… Read More

With minor modifications, this story was originally written for the prompt Snow, in 2017, but it will be new for most of the current readers. ———————————————————————————————————————————– The weather report called for snow, but none had come yet, so we all went to work; no call for alarm. It started snowing around noon on Monday. I… Read More

“So Mom, guess what happened today?” She’s washing, I’m drying. The house is finally quiet, everyone is settling down, and it’s the first time we’ve been alone together all day. “Oh, Barb, just tell me, I don’t have time to play games.” I know exactly what she’s thinking. This happens every single night. “Remember I… Read More