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…
Blog Archives
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,…
’Twas the Night Before Christmas: Textual issues
I’m fine with flying reindeer delivering presents to every earthly child in one night. However, Mr. Clement C. Moore has imbedded some serious textual inconsistencies in “Twas the Night Before Christmas.” The reindeer and sleigh are clearly diminutive: “miniature sleight…
Tagged with: Christmas, Clement C. Moore, Santa, St. Nick, willing suspension of disbelief
Posted in Just life
Posted in Just life
Flipping on Anna Karenina
In the summer when I was sixteen, I read great gobs of Anna Karenina with my feet over my head. I had been somberly informed that you retain information better if there is more blood in your brain. This seemed…
Things I wanted as a kid
To find whole new chapters in favorite books, as if the pages stuck together on earlier readings were now magically revealed. A secret passage from the outside of the house straight into my room, so if I was on the…
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