Happy birthday, Gary! When you’re born on the 13th of any month, you (presumably) get used to the occasional Friday the 13th birthday. Gary’s 13th birthday was on Friday the 13th back in 1968, which just happened to be the date The Beatles were on the cover of Life Magazine. Earlier in the year, their groundbreaking Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album was still number one, featuring the sweet and simple love song “When I’m 64.” As neatly as…
Christmas is a big deal around our house. When the boys were little, we went a bit nuts with what went under the tree. To counteract that gimme-gimme message, we always made a point of anonymously donating wrapped gifts to children in need. It was a fun family activity to pick out gifts for these boys and girls and wrap them in festive paper. When James was in Beta Club in high school, he came home one day with a…
What in the world is a mondegreen? It’s when you mis-hear words, phrases, lyrics. Here’s an example: Creedence Clearwater Revival’s There’s a bad moon on the rise is heard by some as There’s a bathroom on the right. With this nod to the 25th of the month, here’s an August Christmas story. John has always been a singer. Even as a little kid, our middle child would belt out songs at the top of his lungs. Even when he didn’t…
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…
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…
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…