Driving home last night, I heard a local historian on WDVX radio telling a story of the Civil War Battle of Stones River, near Murfeesboro, TN, not far from Knoxville where I live. This story for me seems metaphoric of…

The first house my parents bought was in Metuchen, NJ., and after a 50s style cocktail party w/ Old Fashioneds and Martinis, they determined that the house needed an ancient Egyptian mural featuring all of us. My father had built…

Apparently WordPress has a limit to picture inclusions. These are the ones that didn’t make it: a window on South Street and a religious statement in an antique store.

I went to graduate schools in Philadelphia (U of Penn in English literature and Temple U for radio-TV-film) and since my sister lives there, I return often. It’s a wonderful city, beautiful, wildly diverse neighborhoods, plenty of that history and…

I stumbled on this letter from Helen Keller. Knocked my socks off. “So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me ‘arch priestess of the sightless,’ ‘wonder woman,’ and a…

It’s a rainy day and I’m thinking about my father. He was a gifted pharmaceutical research chemist with encyclopedic interests. I can see him now, so many evenings when I was growing up, sitting in an arm chair pouring over…

It’s a warm winter morning in eastern Tennessee, enough for a light jacket when walking Jesse the Dog, in the 40s with a clearing blue sky. All seasonal weather, nothing so special in these parts, but it reminds me of…

My grandmother was loving, kind and self-sacrificing. Margaret, my grandfather’s lady friend with whom he took up after my grandmother’s death, was none of that. Margaret did have lovely skin, as she often pointed out. She was from New Orleans,…

If you ever sew, even an occasional button, and have less than 20-20 vision, you want these needles. Instead of poking blindly, increasingly convinced that a company of rich men, a dozen Rupert Murdocks, could enter the Kingdom of Heaven…