Suprise Me

As we stood there, very excited to have busted in without tickets, Neil Young was joking about “Sugar Mountain,” a song that he told us had too many verses. Read More

Because, really, how many middle-aged couples would be willing to take in a small child and turn their comfortable lifestyle on its head with bottles and baby food and diapers and naps. Read More

Yes, I've chatted with the great beyond. Read More

David came home for Christmas break from Stanford freshman year and announced he was going to join the band. I scoffed. He had played piano in elementary school, so perhaps remembered how to read music, but knew no other instrument that would help in a marching band. “What will you play,” I queried, “the triangle”?… Read More

I’m driving to work at the main post office in downtown Indianapolis.  I should be in college for my senior year, but I have been suspended due to my participation in disruptive protests during Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970. Indianapolis is my hometown. I’m back in the house, living with my… Read More

Retrospect Caption Contest (just like the New Yorker): Please write a caption for this picture of Donald Fagen, age 71, who is the co-founder and lead singer of the band Steely Dan. You may recall one of their biggest songs, Hey Nineteen. Here is an excerpt from the lyrics: Hey, nineteen That’s ‘Retha Franklin She… Read More

It’s a daunting task to put my experience with Retrospect into perspective. To say it’s been meaningful is a huge understatement. A little background, already familiar to some of you, to others not. Although I never considered myself a writer, some time in 2016 I got it in my head to write a memoir about… Read More

Judging by the store I went to, I can place this story some time in the late 90s. Gina was away in Lawrence, Kansas doing some collaborative research with a scientist at KU. Of course I picked THEN to get the flu. After a couple of days, I started to feel very ill. I had… Read More

Hi, I came across your story of Joy and Arthur quite by chance after a random google search. I married my childhood sweetheart in 1968 at St Mark’s Church on the Overcliffe Gravesend Kent England. We met when she was sixteen and I was seventeen. We only had until 1988 when she sadly died. Her… Read More

Within the next few years, the American Academy of Pediatrics would declare that no child should have her or his recess taken away because of their classroom conduct,.. Read More