The Limit
There is, it seems, for each of us, a fixed number of words. During the course of one’s life, there is a maximum. I tell you this not as a fact, but as a warning.…
Price Tower
(January 17, 2009) At a Lambda Alpha meeting the other day, at a table full of architects, the subject of the Price Tower came up. I’m not a fan, and I said so, calling it…
Too Much Coffee
October 7, 2016 Our school had a fair every year, sort of a mini-Renaissance Fair called the Rites of May. It took place in, well, May, in the courtyard of the school. This being Hyde…
Romeo
The new release of West Side Story, I’m told, doesn’t include the big duet of Somewhere that’s in the 1960s movie. It was a big deal, with Natalie Wood and whoever the dude was singing…
Cicadas
(With apologies to H.P. Lovecraft – as I walked this morning listening to the cicada hum, the noise gave me a creepy feeling of dread, and I wondered how he would write about the bugs…
Grandpa Dan’s Peanut
February 25.2022 “I don’t care if it did happen that way. Change it. It’s boring.” – My sophomore creative writing teacher. I don’t know if this story is true. In retrospect, I doubt it. It’s…
Neurology and flying
My mother’s Parkinson’s disease changes how she walks. Not just her stride, her stutter-step, her false starts, but how she walks, her means for doing so. When she begins her stride, she breathes as if…
How I Met Your Mother
(Composed while talking to Oliver, age 4 or 5, who asked. For some reason, it all came out rhyming) I was sitting at the station, I was waiting for a trainwhen something came to happen…
One Boy, Two Votes
(a summer camp letter with an old family story) June 30, 2004 Dear Jonah: I got a new thing for my computer, that lets me talk while it does the typing . I know, I…
Remembering Pinot
(Memorial for our dog, delivered in our backyard in 2011.) When we planned this thing, we were in pretty rough shape, but I still had my doubts about a memorial for a dog. I thank…