Suprise Me

... so I picked up a tape of Night at the Opera and a large block of dark chocolate, and we all had a fun time that New Year's Eve. Read More

The Plug-In Drug Most of my friends have been TV bingeing for years,  and during the pandemic lockdown it certainly was the activity of choice. But I’ve never been much of a TV watcher,  and I couldn’t agree more with Marie Winn when in the 1970s she wrote about the problems inherent in watching  too much… Read More

The equipment I am using...is not a traditional stationary bike: not even one of those souped-up Peloton bikes that are so highly promoted.  it is one of my own road bikes, minus its rear wheel. Read More

My wife once read, in what I hope was not People magazine, that our bodies go through a major metabolic change about every seven years. I tend to believe that because, as I think about my own life, that schedule seems to fit. Those seven-year increments can generally be identified by, or associated with, songs,… Read More

Pick a card. Any card. How many times has a kid asked you to do that? Read More

Chain letters were never my thing. Read More

In the fall of 1976, I lied on an application in order to get a job as a janitor at Massachusetts General Hospital. Read More

This is my first memory, and is it accurate? I believe it is, especially now that I have a lot of context around it. Read More

I began a new job in May, 1981. I had interviewed for it for quite some time, (Walt at MDS), and had to convince two hardcore male chauvinists that I was the right person for the job, though my immediate supervisor was enthusiastic about hiring me. The two older men hired a man my age… Read More

Captain Born in a small town in New York’s Catskill Mountains,  my father remembered dancing around a bonfire as a six-year-old to celebrate the 1918 armistice. Two decades later when the US entered WWII he enlisted in the Army as a newly minted physician.   Assigned to the Charleston,  SC  Port of Embarkation,  he was… Read More