Suprise Me

Why did my parents give me the most popular girl's name of the Fifties? I guess they just liked it. Read More

We'd had all the vaccines available at the time ... but this was the only time I refused a vaccine. Read More

Jamaica Plain housing project — age 3, going on 4 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

So why couldn't they read the neatly transcribed directions? Well, because they were written in cursive. Read More

Accessories? I have never been into purses or shoes or hats or scarves. I have bought all those things, of course, but only as needed, not in a collecting kind of way. However, in junior high school, I wore bows in my hair almost every day. My coiffure may not have been the angel hair… Read More

It was clear I needed a job.  Turning twenty, literate (two years of college behind me), energetic, and flexible—surely this would not be too hard.  But it turned out I knew nothing about finding work. Read More

  I have been given such gifts words choke in my throat as I reach, I stretch, bend and shake toward expressing the utter astonishment the deep wonder the overpowering gratitude at this moment I am  awake Read More

Nobody is coming to our house for Thanksgiving this pandemic year, it's just the two of us. Read More

Readers of Retrospect may recall my maternal grandparents from two other stories, No Way To Say Goodbye, about my grandfather’s death, and Which Side Are You On?, in which I discussed their flight from the Cossacks and their search for the American Dream. They were a significant part of my childhood, living with my parents, my sisters, and me in our… Read More