Suprise Me

In the summer of 1965 I decided I wanted to learn how to play the guitar. I was turning 14 at the end of the summer, and it was my second year at a leftist work camp called Lincoln Farm. One of my favorite aspects of camp was the singing we did — at campfires,… Read More

Had someone drugged the soft drink they served me, at the offices of the mining company where my newfound friends needed to make a stop? Was I influenced by the sultry thirty-something woman who insisted that I receive my first lesson in appraising sapphires? Read More

Like many baby boomers, I cast my first vote for president a few months after graduating college. But I never got a chance to vote for the candidate of my choice. I had heard Bobby Kennedy speak on my OU campus, and I was ready to help change the world by voting for him. Sadly,… Read More

Hidden books, '70s television shows, and Words With Friends have all been guilty pleasures for me. Read More

My Brown-Eyed Girl I wear reading glasses, and have had the requisite cataract surgeries,   yet over the years I haven’t given much thought to my eyeglasses or to my changing vision.   But I have thought about the color of my eyes. In Rogers and Hammerstein’s musical masterpiece Carousel, the carnival barker Billy Bigelow soliloquizes about… Read More

I grew up in a three-story apartment building in Palo Alto, California – a rectangular concrete building that still stands at the corner of Grant Avenue and Ash Street. Today, that part of town is crammed full of chic restaurants and expensive condos, but in the 1960s and 70s it was just a little neighborhood, tucked into a… Read More

“There would have been no rescue here!” The fire marshal held my arm as fiercely as my gaze, neither of us paying attention to the breast milk leaking across my shirt. I tore my eyes away from his and tried again to look at the house, still reeking of wet char, a crazy perimeter of crime tape separating the ugly remains of our home from the gorgeous June morning. Read More

HER kindergarten teacher had taught the class the wonders of white-bread-and-French's-mustard sandwiches. Blecch. Read More

ASPCA “The cancer has spread.”.  said the vet,  “It’s time to put her down if you don’t want the cat to suffer.”  So broken-hearted,  we said goodbye to our beloved Lucy Gray. Taking a walk a few days later we found ourselves in front of the ASPCA.  We looked at each other and without a… Read More

Now that my parents are gone, I realize there were so many questions I wish I had asked them. All I have now are their letters to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of the years between when they met and their marriage. Read More