I must have been about eight when I read a passing reference to a boy who organized his mind every evening. Unbelievably, the writer barreled on without explaining how, but the project seemed so essential that I decided I must…
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Organizing my mind
Tagged with: eight years old, Furness Shakespeare Library, Libraries, Organizing the mind, University of Pennsylvania
Posted in Just life
Posted in Just life
It must be a memory
I’m sure I remember this, that it wasn’t a dream. What’s remarkable is the quality of sensations that are not exactly thoughts, as if they came before words. I’m very small, being held between the knees of someone much larger,…
Ambitions of a Protestant Saint
At age 9, I decided to be the first Protestant saint, which would catapult me into a new edition of A Child’s History of Heroes and Heroines. I knew this was a stretch. My Sunday school teachers had been quite…
On glimpsing darkness and light
When our granddaughter Silvia was nearly four, we were stopped in traffic near the local military cemetery, row on row of tombstones. “What are those white things?” she asked. I said they marked where soldiers were buried. “All those are…
When lies make you sputter
In the current super-heated medical-political world you hear lies that make you sputter. How can an apparently thinking person voice such thoughts? Doesn’t this nonsense stick coming out of the throat? Answering with facts just doesn’t matter. All those years…
Louis Braille’s pocket ego
The summer I was nine, I lived mostly on biographies. I’d ride my bike to the Westfield, NJ public library and laboriously pick out the four books I was allowed. The Signature series featured a medallion with the Famous Person’s…
Wonder under the street
A plain summer day when I was seven stretched out for my girlfriends and me. We were walking along Dorian Road in Metuchen, looking for adventure. Suddenly, there it was, like the mythical gold on American streets. I’m talking…
Tagged with: Childhood, Childhood thinking, Metuchen, Storm sewers, What were you thinking?
Posted in Just life
Posted in Just life
Lost wallet, moonshot
Recently, I noticed my husband’s wallet on the cutting board in the kitchen. This was clearly a one-off for someone who pretty much never loses, misplaces or forgets anything. How very odd. But that event reminded me of another lost…
Chemist looks for trouble
My father loved problems. He looked for them in a good way. He was an organic chemist, doing process research in pharmaceuticals for Merck. He worked on the Sinemet, for Parkinsons, which he later took himself, on some of the…
Savior drives a Cadillac
Years ago, I was living in California and my father in New Jersey was diagnosed with advanced non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, likely to be fatal in four months. I flew home and my mother picked me up at Newark Airport. Befuddled and exhausted,…
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