Suprise Me

“When someone says he’s God and tells you to kill somebody,” my brother counsels me, “don’t listen to him.” Read More

Saturday Night at the Big Y When the lights went out in New York during the great northeast blackout of 1965,  I was browsing with a friend at Georg Jensen,  the upscale Madison Avenue silver shop.   Then all us shoppers held hands,  and in single file we groped our way out to the dark… Read More

Some things never change. Like many of you, dear readers, I have a hoard of memorabilia. Mine includes early writing and poetry…most of it cringeworthy. That’s why it’s in my shed in a box labeled “TO SHRED OR DESTROY (without reading, please!)” For some reason I couldn’t (can’t!) seem to let it go…maybe I gleaned… Read More

It was lonely.  I suppose it was just adolescent agonizing over the search for independence and existential meaning, while simultaneously longing for acceptance and inclusion from kids my age. You know, the usual. Read More

My first typing experience was on an old Royal manual.  I could go like a bat outta hell on that thing, typing 80 words a minute with maybe one typo.  The other people in the office where I worked would sometimes stand around my desk and just watch me.  My boss bragged about his secretary’s… Read More

My mother-in-law and her sister loved taking pictures of sunrises.  Both women shared many of them on Facebook or by email or text from their ipads; a very techie thing for a couple women in their 80’s.  They obviously felt sunrises are much more special than I thought them to be.  I’m more of a… 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

We are yet mired in anxiety. Read More

I never asked to be a movie critic. And yet it happened. People don’t believe me when I say this; they assume movie reviewing is such a plum job that I must have scrambled and hustled to get there. Not really. In 1991 I’d been working at the San Francisco Chronicle seven years when the… Read More

I like to think of history in astronomical terms of spiraling orbits. In the same way the sun hurtles through space and our planets spiral along behind it, forever trying to catch up, history doesn’t move in cycles, it moves in spirals. I’d like to offer the possibility that — with our most recent inauguration… Read More