Suprise Me

In the face of injustice ... resistance. Read More

It wasn’t Selma.  But it was Detroit.  It was very public.  But, for me, it was deeply personal. There were two days of inner city rioting just after Martin Luther King’s assassination. And as, if not more importantly, the previous summer (1967) the Detroit police provoked inner city black residents to engage five days and… Read More

Coming of age during the Vietnam War did not mean you would be automatically drafted. If you were a privileged white boy, as I was, those less fortunate often took your place. In college, you could have used connections to get into the National Guard, as George W. Bush did to avoid active duty in… Read More

Fear of the Other I’m a white woman who for years worked in a public high school in New York’s inner city –  in fact in the infamous south Bronx of Fort Apache fame. I usually carpooled to work with fellow teachers  but at times took the subway from my upper east-side Manhattan neighborhood .  As… Read More

Aunt Babs and Uncle Paul I’ve written about all my aunts and uncles before. (See Call Me by Their Names) Here’s more about my wonderful aunt Babs and uncle Paul,  high school sweethearts who met as kids in the Rockaways. Family legend has it that when he was in medical school at NYU,  and Babs was… Read More

The great river of class, culture and convictions afforded me a way out. Read More

But if one was the picture-perfect-postcard of a vacation the other was the photographic negative from which it was printed. Read More

(Note; this was first written for the prompt BOREDOM on July 27, 2019. I have made a few, minor changes). I get lost in my thoughts, day dream, or fantasize; no time to be bored. My mind wanders back to a happy time that I want to re-live and cement in my memory. I will… Read More

A Thousand Little Touches My father – six years older than my mother – died in his early 80s.   (See My Dad and the Word Processor,   Saying Farewell to a Special Guy,  Six Pack, My Father, the Outsider Artist,  GP and Turkey and Trimmings with Flu Shot) My mother,  who it seemed had never been sick… Read More

I’ve never been big on sin. Sin belongs to a god thing full of good, evil, and punishment, straight-jacketing people with shame, and excommunicating so many nice things. Regardless of my godless stance, at age 11, I helped myself to three temptations. First, I sought out pictures of naked women in magazines, stolen from my… Read More