August is a long, hot month. Back to school starts too early, as do the Christmas ads. In keeping with my retirement goal to read a book each week, here are the late-summer titles. Week 1: Ladies Who Punch by Ramin Setoodeh This seemed like a good choice for “summer beach reading,” even though we didn’t go to the shore. Definitely an interesting read, but only made me less interested in watching The View than before. The egos and downright…
My parents are nature lovers. (For a reason I don’t recall, this moniker was often pronounced “nay-CHOO love-OOS” over the years.) My two older brothers even went to “nature camp” back in grade school. Indeed, they each won a free week at Nature Camp for scoring highly on tests given following Saturday morning nay-choo films at the local museum in Pittsfield. I went just once. Sacrificing Saturday morning cartoons for a chance at nature camp just wasn’t worth it to…
Happy Birthday to James – as you turn 20, that means Dad and I no longer have any teenagers. (Yes, it’s all about us.) Tom became a teen in 1997, so that means we’ve have teen(s) in the house for 22 years. Other parents don’t particularly like to hear this, but our three “brudders” were never a bother. No real “terrible twos” or teen-angst years to grit our teeth through. Just three extremely likable, reasonable, hard-working, kind, creative, and amusing…
Nearly four decades ago – on August 7, 1982 – Gary and I got married. We’d met 18 months prior. I was a reporter, he was a local farmer fighting the federal government to save his land. My first words to my future husband: What the hell’s a watershed? Gary’s animated response won me over, and I’ve never tired of his stories in all these years. We met in February of 1981. Gary popped the question in December. We planned…
Terre Haute, Indiana, is one of the last places on Earth you’d expect to find a Mengele Twin. The heinous Angel of Death nearly killed Eva Mozes back in Auschwitz when she was just 10 years old. But she and her identical twin sister, Miriam, not only lived to tell about it, they thrived for decades. Eva even came to forgive her tormentors. Eva married fellow Holocaust survivor Michael Kor and settled with him in Terre Haute, where they raised…
One of my happiest moments on stage back in college was playing my soul sister, Lucy van Pelt, in “You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown.” The Peanuts gang is tasked with writing “a book report on Peter Rabbit” and the characters each approach the musical assignment in their own way. Lucy, of course, concentrates on the number of words required and is very, very, very careful to hit 100 on the nose. Funny thing, I remember back in second grade…
Since he was a wee lad, James’s musical preference was clear. He’s a metal head. Even before James could sit up unsupported, oldest brother Thomas would sit with him or prop him up in a bean bag chair and crank up Metallica. From the very start, the baby’s tiny head would bob to the beat. No doubt about it, he was a head-banger. As he got a bit older, James would crawl up onto the rocking chair and point at…
Nowadays, there are graduation ceremonies to celebrate moving on from nearly every grade and every activity. It used to annoy me until I realized the end result could be a photo like this one: Back in my parents’ day, though, it took many years of study to achieve a graduation ceremony. At St. Francis School in New Haven, Connecticut, there was even a group portrait taken when the class passed out of 8th grade. There’s Mom – Joan Cassidy- in…
As a child of the ’60s, my introduction to robots was the limb-flailing “Danger, Will Robinson!” creation of the TV show Lost in Space. I wanted one. Flash forward to 2019, and I keep that nosy Siri turned off, don’t want a Roomba sweeping my floors, and somehow manage to type my own texts. So imagine my horror when Gary and I came across this creature, stalking us during our recent visit to Connecticut. We were in the Stop &…
This whole retirement thing has been a fascinating experiment. Tomorrow marks the start of Week 2; the most interesting part so far has been the reaction of my (now former) co-workers. “What will you do?” “Will you stay in the area?” “Will you travel? All questions were accompanied by looks of deep concern. It was baffling. The worst part was the incessant use of the term “your next chapter.” So in fact, those questions were: What will you do in…