Suprise Me

Photos of families, couples, and mobs, shuttered or pixilated images preserve decades of life, love, and memory, chaos captured, order performed. Random or planned, group photos reflect group purpose. We gathered to chronicle the choking, smoke-filled days and siren-screaming nights of ’92, to project a cinematic family photo, to replicate violence against a lone black… Read More

How my effort at "early present discovery" backfired. Read More

Do I dare to gift myself with my true name of Lauren? Probably too late, and after all, no one calls me “Big Laurie” anymore. Mostly, I go by Gramma. Read More

St. Joseph’s school in Nashua, NH, no longer exists. Today it’s a Catholic Charities office building, and back in 1958 it wasn’t much to look at, either.  But it was just six blocks from my home in the back of Hebert’s Market at 189 Kinsley Street, just two blocks from my Mom’s birthplace at 9 Wason Ave., and… Read More

With a sigh, I gave the earring up for lost but kept its mate as a memento. 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

The first car I ever drove (at the age of 15—legal in Louisiana at the time) was my parents’ Pontiac GTO. Why a middle class Jewish family had such a car, I do not know, but I do remember that my boyfriend at the time liked to put it in neutral at stoplights so that… Read More

The skin on my grandmother’s hands was paper thin. It’s what I remember most about her. She also had piercing brown eyes and a way of clamping her lips together that signaled her disapproval. She wasn’t a warm and affectionate sort of grandmother. Not at all. She was more of a “my way or the… Read More

My mother was out on some errand, and Susan asked if she could have a cup of coffee.  That seemed important to her (we didn't understand the caffeine imperative yet), so my older sister and I, who had never actually made coffee, tried to rise to the occasion.  Read More

My partner, Dina’s mother Barbara, was going out with her for support, and Dina needed someone to look after her pup, whom she called “Monkey”. I told her to forget about boarding, especially because Monkey had been a shelter pup, and volunteered to look after him at our house. Read More