I wish I could remember who pointed this out years ago, but I think it was one of these ladies: This photo takes me back to the summer after my folks moved to Fairfield for the second time. It was following my sophomore year at IU, and I’d invited several high-school friends (from our first round in Fairfield) over for lunch. One of them noticed a certain lamp. “Isn’t that the lamp from the Dick Van Dyke Show?” What?! To…
Does anyone else feel conflicted about blueberries? They’ve rolled in and out of my life over the years, with mixed reviews. Let’s start with 1961. Apparently I just loved a bowl of fresh blueberries and cream. Mom even wrote a poem about it: For Paula, Who Is Three Tomorrow (I won’t be able to do it then) Who likes blueberries, blueberries, blueberries …all of the children in our house. For we have small and padded bearswho sit on small and…
The usual meaning for the term “keyboard warriors” is those angry trolls who make sure social media is always stirred up with arguments and untruths. For our purposes, though – and during Teach Music Week – we’ll look at the keyboards that tie our family together. Piano keyboards. Dad remembers taking piano lessons when his family lived in Lowell in the early 1940s. He was ten or 11 and would walk just a few blocks to get to Mrs. Salmonson’s…
Today is Grandma Cassidy‘s birthday. And it’s Poetry Day. Born in 1903, Grandma wouldn’t have permitted us to calculate her age, had the luck of the Irish kept her with us all these years. Saints preserve us! Me sainted Grandmother has made her home in heaven since 1991. I was “great with child” at the time, with middle-son John on the way and couldn’t travel to attend her funeral in New Haven. I’ve always believed her blithe spirit lives on…
I never met him, but David Leet meant a lot to me over the years. Captain David L. Leet. From Kenosha, Wisconsin. A Marine. He served in Vietnam. The fall of 1973, I was a sophomore at Andrew Warde High School in Fairfield, Connecticut. Typical teen, life was: 1) All about me, and 2) Totally miserable. Dad had been offered a new position with General Electric and our family was preparing to move to Indiana. It was September and America’s…