Humor

  • The Sound of Silence

    “You are awfully quiet, are you ok?” That question was asked of me often in my youth. I replied aloud, “Yes, I’m fine,” while I silently thought, “You sure talk a lot, are you ok?” God forgive my bias toward quiet people. I do embrace my introversion though, because I had quiet mentors in my…

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  • Eggcorn genius

    My friends from South Jersey are different than Okies. They eat hoagies instead of subs, dip their ice cream cone in jimmies instead of sprinkles, and they vacation at the shore rather than the beach. And, if they ask you for a drink of water, you might bring them back a lumberjack. Language is fascinating…

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  • If you’ve ever wondered what goes on in the mind of an introvert writer, here it is. We like judging people. Not in the indicting sense, but rather as a playful mind game that often displaces conversation. Shame on us who prefer an imagined conversation rather than reality. It does, however, assuage the boredom of…

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  • My New Tattoo in Old English

    Yogi Berra was describing his own version of Einstein’s Relativity theory when he remarked, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” I thought of the future that used to be as I sat in a deep leather recliner at Eggbert’s cafe, waiting for a table on a Saturday morning, a pager in hand while…

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  • All the Laughs on Your Side

    “Do you have time to come home and help Dad? He fell and broke his leg.” Well, yes Mom, since you put it that way, I think I can find the time. And thanks for phrasing it in a non-urgent way so as not to alarm me and also give me an out in case…

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  • A Thousand Pines

    He can tell a story better than Mark Twain on a riverboat drinking whiskey in the moonlight, although the surreal and the absurd are difficult to distinguish from reality. I hang near him at family gatherings, because I’m a writer and he gives me stuff you can’t make up. And like Seinfeld’s blonde girlfriend who…

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  • Last night at the Brady Theater, Garrison Keillor sang and told stories accompanied only by a piano and his red sneakers. He talked about a conversation with a girl from an age he didn’t quite understand. She had lots of steel in various orifices, the lips, ears, nose. Keillor said it looked as if she…

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  • This was a football catch for the ages in a million backyards, a thousand Friday nights, and a hundred campus Saturdays, just not according to the technocrats at the National Football League.

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  • My wife reminds me occasionally that I forgot to propose, and that our marriage certificate was not notarized properly under the laws of New Jersey. We’ve been not married for 29 years now. To assuage my guilt, awash in the glut of new age engagements initiated by princes in hot air balloons accompanied by life-sized…

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  • My son spent every waking moment of 1996 as a three-year old child repeating one word, “Why?” Why are there big red balls on some electric power lines and why can’t he wear his socks according to thickness instead of color and why do arrows on signs point up into the heavens where cars can’t…

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