Suprise Me

A summer love affair with a flimsy VW camper-bus. Read More

Our phone number was CE9-2609. CE stood for the Center exchange. No area code. 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

Even though the hairdresser at Best's gave me a terrible haircut, the trauma may not have been entirely her fault. Read More

The first time I saw snow was the year my family lived in Manhattan. My sister and I attended elementary school across the street from our building.  We’d bundle up in our new winter coats, pants, mittens, and boots. Just one winter: getting used to the smell of wet things drying on the radiator, taking… Read More

They say you never forget how to ride—it is, after all, “just like riding a bicycle”. Read More

"Uh, John," I asked, "have you ever driven in snow?" "No," he replied. "Is that a problem?" Read More

The Alphabet Wall When our son Noah was in kindergarten I bought a sheet of colorful, stick-on alphabet letters in both lower and upper case.   But as the kitchen fridge was already covered with magnets and  photos and the kid’s artwork,  I decided to stick the alphabet letters on the tiled wall in the… Read More

I didn’t notice when Suzanne first showed up. We unloaded the stage, carried it into the theater, and assembled it behind the proscenium, a stage upon a stage. First came the wine barrels, then the interlocking frame, and finally the wooden platforms. We lashed the backdrop to the uprights and, with a shout from cast… Read More

This is about another person’s temptation, a very little person. I was getting some provisions in between snowstorms and was riding up and down the aisles of a large grocery store in one of those electric carts. I had paused to read some labels. Around the corner in front of me come a mom and… Read More