On a late July day a few summers ago, my wife and I were wandering around the stunning campus of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles when my wife’s phone rang. After listening for a minute, she burst into tears. Clueless, as is often the case with me, I immediately jumped to the worst possible […]

I am in a sporting goods store looking at artificial lures – specifically, the ones that boast they can catch mighty big stripers. In front of me is a wall display of 6-inch-long pink rubber squids dangling very enticing hot pink tentacles. What phylum they belong to, I know not. Their Latin scientific name? I […]

In November 1998, I attended a New Jersey multi-class high school reunion. Pushing 50 with a short stick, I was still single, living large in Long Beach, California. I was gobsmacked to run into my freshman year “heartthrob” (she back then, a senior), but now divorced, healed and content with her life in Maine. We […]

One particularly crisp fall evening, when excitement was in the air, Spyros decided to show us the Cafe de Flore, taking into consideration our interest in the arts. It was Paris, 1971. We had escaped to Europe to commence a new life. When we arrived at the cafe, the front windows were folded back to […]

On Dec. 3, 2021, I had open-heart surgery. My mitral valve, which had been repaired in 2010, now needed to be replaced with a shiny new one. I looked forward to not being short of breath whenever I walked upstairs or up the slightest incline. I’d been through open-heart surgery before, so I wasn’t overly […]

In May 1964, my friend’s mother was reading the Sunday paper and said, “Hey, girls, that group you like, the Beatles, is coming to Boston in September. Tickets go on sale this week. Would you like to go?” Would we like to go? We would both turn 14 that year, and we hadn’t yet been […]

Over the years I’ve been guilty of making jokes to lighten up my life choices – like the fact that I chose to become a waitress instead of going to college right after high school. In later years I even remember a student from my graduating class say, “I thought it was so cool that […]