Life

  • Karen and I were once DINKs… Double Income, No Kids. We were young and relatively unencumbered. Karen taught high school math in Maple Shade, New Jersey. I practiced as a CPA — which meant I spent my days talking about depreciation schedules while wondering why no one invited me to interesting conversations. The partners at…

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  • I’m writing a book. My daughter is baking and selling bread. My brother runs a wood shop, making wooden blocks for children.

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  • What Progress Can’t Measure: A Ripe Life

    My brother visited over Thanksgiving. He drove, sorry, he sat in a self-driving Tesla and never touched the steering wheel from Utica, New York, to Bartlesville. He brought apples from a local orchard. They were perfectly ripe—crisp, sweet, juicy. It made me think that maybe our lives should be considered this way. Ripe means ready…

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  • “Why are we here?” Karen asked this nonchalantly, as if she were wondering why roosters have combs on their heads. I was hoping she was talking to herself—or that the question was rhetorical. But since we were driving to Houston, I was a captive audience. She persisted. “Why are we here?” “Well,” I said, “maybe…

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  • Living an Interrupted Life

    Living an Interrupted Life

    For those wondering how I am, I’m better. The warm February weather helps. There’s also a certain kind of magic in a Margherita pizza, especially when savored al fresco under the slanting rays of a winter sun—my wife Karen’s happiest place. Karen and I are simple folk; she was born in the projects of Trenton,…

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  • My Old School

    My Old School

    I remember walking the halls of my old grade school in my early twenties when I was busily fulfilling the truth of George Bernard Shaw’s old saw, “Youth is wasted on the young.” The halls had mysteriously shrunk but the place still smelled of pine-scented cleaner on polished linoleum. They tore the school down in…

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  • Moments in Time

    Moments in Time

    I’ve been hanging out at the office with Emery, my 10-month-old granddaughter. She comes to work with her mom. Emery makes me laugh, and I make her giggle. She is a lousy employee; she sleeps a lot and doesn’t get much work done. On warm, sunny days, we walk around the pond next to our…

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  • Musings at 35,000 feet

       I recently picked up my son and daughter-in-law from the airport and the subject of airliner models arose. My first flight was on a Lockheed TriStar L-1011 equipped with a headphone sound system and I listened to Carly Simon’s, That’s the Way I Always Heard it Should Be. “You say we’ll soar like two…

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  • Wind Dancer

    My granddaughter, Holland, just got a new pair of sneakers. She looks down at her feet and marvels that just fourteen months before her feet were tucked in the fetal position. Okay, maybe she can’t recall those moments in the womb before she burst into the world like shimmering sunlit foil. So I imagine for…

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