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 […]
Reading Time: 4 minutes On January 19, 2023 Sharon and I will be leaving from Los Angeles (Long Beach, really) aboard the Island Princess for a round-the-world cruise. According to the information sheet, we will be sailing 34,500 nautical miles. But who’s counting? I’ve been very fortunate in life, and don’t really have any particular must-do items left on […]
Reading Time: 6 minutes If you ask a little kid the classic question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and the kid answers, “I want to be an optometrist,” you might drop dead on the spot. It just doesn’t happen. Well, hardly ever. (I can hear my optometrist friends laughing—at least three of my classmates […]
Reading Time: 7 minutes This rabbi gig. People have no idea what it’s all about. That’s the tag line that Catherine deCuir and I decided to use for our novel, The Rabbi Finds Her Way. I didn’t write it, and neither did Catherine. Our protagonist, Rabbi Pearl Ross-Levy, wrote it herself. Other than two musical theatre pieces (which are more […]
Reading Time: 6 minutes As an alcoholic, I was a complete failure. I still remember the first time I got drunk. I was about seven or eight, and was with my parents and sister at the home of Aunt Gladys (my mother’s sister), her husband, Uncle Irv, and my cousins, Gil and Howard. It was the Passover holiday, and […]
Reading Time: 6 minutes Many people who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and read the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1970s and beyond probably remember a column called The Grab Bag. It was created by L.M. Boyd, and at one point appeared in nearly 400 newspapers. I certainly read it (along with the comics). The column was a fast […]
Reading Time: 7 minutes Being a musician (or any type of artist, I suppose) adds a special burden to one’s life. It certainly has to mine. An example of this dilemma was well-illustrated in an old Cathy cartoon I once read. As I remember it (I’m paraphrasing), she is interviewing a client, who says, “I’m not really a client—I’m […]