This is the first memory piece I ever wrote, long before Retrospect, or taking the Chilmark Writer’s Workshop. I wrote it in 1994, immediately after the events in the story took place and I tucked it away. I had to get my thoughts out. As you can see from the comments below, I’ve shared it… Read More

The last time I wrote to this prompt was November 7, 2016, the day before our world turned upside down. In that essay, Born Blue, I described what a proud liberal Democrat I was. And I remain so, though these last two years have sorely tried my faith in humanity. My husband went to bed at… Read More

I have never been much of a prankster. I don’t like having them played on me, usually don’t find them funny and am not creative in thinking them up. So this is a difficult prompt for me. I never created mischief on Halloween, or any other night, for that matter. The closest I came was… Read More

The night after my father died I received a call from an older first cousin, trying to console me. He remembered that I was a serious little girl who LOVED jewelry. Funny, but not a surprising combination, since my maternal grandfather owned a jewelry store in Toledo, OH and when we visited, I would press… Read More

Yes, I know, “Yesterday” isn’t on “Rubber Soul”, but this is the only original Beatles album I own. My mother didn’t approve of me listening to that sort of music, so I had to sneak it, by plugging my ear phones into my transistor radio. How could you not love the infectious upbeat, cute guys… Read More

I went to work for Management Decision Systems in May of 1981. It was a young, vibrant company founded by John D. C. Little and Glen Urban of MIT Sloan School, Len Lodish of Wharton and two of their brightest students, Jay Wurts and Rick Karash, to do marketing models. It expanded to do all… Read More

The memories are still painful. A close friend once wished I could have a selective lobotomy to block them out. My family moved from Detroit to a near suburb when I was just shy of 11. In Detroit, if your birthday fell between December 1 and the end of February, you started school in the… Read More

I have a notorious black thumb. I killed a philodendron in my college dorm room and those things are indestructible. I killed all my house plants, so replaced them with good-looking silk ones. No fuss, no muss. But that is indoors. The great outdoors is less and more capricious. Back home in Newton, MA, my… Read More

I recently heard Nicco Mele, head of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, speak. He doesn’t use the term “Fake News” to describe the hi-jacking of truth by our president, Russian hackers, trolls and bots who spread lies or disinformation via Facebook and Twitter, or the abundance of verifiably false… Read More

(Note: this prompt first came up on July 23, 2018, which is when this story was originally written and published. I have added some new anecdotes and made some edits. It should be noted that as a high school teenager, I was not paying much attention to the political world around me.) The radio alarm… Read More