My mother always had a wonderful sense of rhythm and a great ability to move her body to the beat of the music. I inherited that and my love of the arts from her. As a close friend, also with a depressed mother, said to me when I called to tell her of my mother’s… Read More

I loved getting mail. While email is immediate, there was something gratifying, even sensual to HOLDING mail in your hand. You could see someone’s penmanship (mine was horrid; I was a straight A student, but C’s in handwriting. It has only grown worse over the years and I still write letters). There was the anticipation… Read More

I have learned that all “tweens” go through tough adolescent years; it seems to be a universal truth. Mine seemed particularly brutal, as we moved from Detroit to a near-suburb, I skipped a grade at this crucial period, the new girls were far more sophisticated and I had a particularly ugly adolescence with buck teeth,… Read More

I am a born organizer and record-keeper. That is just who I am. My degree is in Theatre Arts and I wanted to be an actress, but learned over my four years of college that I was more adept at being a stage manager, writing down all the cues, running the show while in production.… Read More

  We learned long ago that going out on New Year’s Eve was just something we didn’t want to do. Everything was overpriced and you always ran the risk of drunk drivers on the road. So we stayed in with friends and cooked. When David was a baby, I had a few couples over and… Read More

We see lots of movies throughout the year; this year we even attended three film festivals, though many of those films tend to be foreign and never find distribution. We eagerly await this time of year when the “prestige” movies roll out. When I saw the Golden Globe nominees, I was reminded of some good… Read More

My grandfather was born in December in Russia. He didn’t know his actual birth date (no records were kept), so chose Christmas as his birthday. Why not. The world came to a halt and the family would always come to Toledo to celebrate with him. We gathered at a nice hotel and aunts, uncles and… Read More

My father was the youngest of eight children, my mother, the youngest of four and I am their youngest. That makes me the youngest in a large generation of cousins, some old enough to be my own parent. We are a diverse group of people, yet we all get along, have each others’ backs and… Read More

Among the bedrock principles of Judaism are “repairing the world” and “doing righteous deeds”. These inform the imperatives for social justice and charitable activities, so practicing Jews heed these and find ways to do meaningful work. My family became more involved in temple life as my brother, five years my elder, approached his bar mitzvah.… Read More

I had a somewhat tortured gynecological history (never regular periods, an ectoptic pregnancy in 1981, leaving me with one working Fallopian tube, followed nine months later, with the same IUD in place – the doctor never told me to remove it – by another pregnancy which Dan and I chose to abort for health reasons),… Read More