Category: Memoir

AWE AND GRATITUDE

SEPTEMBER 5, 2024 – (Cont.) When Susan and her husband Bob pulled into the yard, I had no idea what to expect. She was such a young kid when we’d last met on the deck of her family’s swimming pool in New Jersey, she’d made no lasting impression. We’d had no contact since. Jenny, who’d …

DISUNION, REUNION, AND RESILIENCE

SEPTEMBER 4, 2024 – (Cont,) Many families experience splits, rifts, friction, upheavals, estrangement. The fractures in our own—cousin vs. cousin (Carol’s father vs. my uncle) and, it seemed, brother vs. brother (Carol’s grandfather vs. mine)—were not unusual as families go. Only a specialisit in abnormal psychology, however, could categorize the discord that ebbed and flowed …

PARALLEL AND PARALLAX

SEPTEMBER 3, 2024 – (Cont.) In anticipation of our mini-reunion with Carol and her husband Barry, Jenny and I talked about things we could do and places where we could dine out. On our list were “Anna’s house” two doors down, where Anna and her husband Mickey lived. They were shirt-tail relatives of ours, though …

ON THE WATER . . . IN 1614

JUNE 20, 2024 – This afternoon we spent 90 minutes aboard a time machine, and though we never left the present, we experienced the past—over 410 years in the past, to be precise. The excitement was aboard the Onrust, a replica of the old Dutch sailing vessel built in 1613-14 by Adrien Block, a lawyer-turned-merchant-fortune …

TWENTY YEARS AGO (PART I OF II)

MAY 24, 2024 – The other day while in conversation with our eight-year-old granddaughter about writing, she asked me how many diaries I had. “Lots,” I said. “Ten?” she asked, seeking greater precision from me. “More than that. If I had to guess, probably several dozen.” “You should count ’em,” she said. We then went …

BEAR WITH ME AS I BARE A PERSONAL CONFLICT, NOW RESOLVED

APRIL 26, 2024 – We live in the Age of Opinion, or more precisely, the Age of Cacophonous Opinion—informed, uninformed and misinformed; often in one-off unorganized bursts, sometimes in regular outrages devoured by legions of subscribers gathered by a common algorithm; scattered to the crosswinds of social media yet occasionally framed according to logic and …

A DREAM SEQUENCE INTERRUPTS “THE NEIGHBORS” SERIES

APRIL 25, 2024 – Often I experience highly symbolic dreams. Perhaps the most symbolic occurred 27 years ago during a particularly stressful period at work. In that dream I found myself in a game of pickle-in-the-middle—playing the role of pickle. The other two players were my boss, with whom in reality I’d long been tangling, …