Reading Time: 8 minutes If the definition of a best friend is someone who knows all of your secrets, then I’d say Ron is still my best friend. He is the keeper of my secrets, and I am the keeper of many of his. We met when we were fourteen-year-old freshmen in high school and were both vulnerable. I […]

Reading Time: 8 minutes When I picture my father, I’m not sure which man is standing in front of me. Is it the dad who taught me how to ride a bike and play baseball, and who stepped up to be Scoutmaster when our troop needed one? Or is it the man dressed in a suit, tie, and topcoat […]

Reading Time: 4 minutes   It all started and ended with Miss Potesta. I didn’t realize that everyone in my class did not sign up for English IV in my senior year of high school. Later I found out that only three years of English was necessary to graduate, so a lot of my classmates chose not to enroll […]

Reading Time: 5 minutes Dear Melinda, My dear friend Melodi told me that you write poetry and stories, and asked me to give you some advice about how to get published. This is a perennial question—“getting published.” I’ve had three books published and have strong feelings, attitudes, and opinions about the subject. To begin with, before I “became a […]

Reading Time: 7 minutes Although it wasn’t as quaint as it sounds now, I attended first grade in a four-room schoolhouse building called the Seymour School (we used to call it “the Old School”) in Wantagh, the town in which I grew up. By the time I attended, the building served only first graders, and I’ve spoken to many […]

Reading Time: 6 minutes One day, my college roommate Mike and I passed a pet store in downtown Boston and decided that what our shared dorm room at Boston University’s Myles Standish Hall needed was a hamster. Like many decisions I was making in my late teens, this one was ill-advised. I named the hamster Freud, which was apropos: […]

Reading Time: 6 minutes I am currently aboard the cruise ship Island Princess, and instead of visiting Picton and Wellington, New Zealand, we have instead passed through Cook Strait in a maneuver to avoid Cyclone Gabrielle and are heading towards Melbourne, Australia. (I am, indeed, posting selected photos and brief comments about the 31 countries and 50 destinations we […]

Reading Time: 15 minutes DAY 0 As with any trip, long or short, a lot of waiting is involved. It was once said by a world traveler (I can’t recall whether it was Marco Polo, Marcus Aurelius, or Mark Twain), “Every great adventure begins with a miserable plane ride.” And so it was with the one-hour flight from Oakland […]