September 1957. My new stepfather dropped me and my new stepbrother (headed for MIT) in Boston after our cross-country trip from California. My stepfather (a wonderful man who would drop dead over the breakfast table six years later, ending my divorced mother’s one shot at happiness) was in a big hurry to meet up with my mother in Denver for their honeymoon. “You guys will be fine,” he said, not looking back. “Fine” was not quite it.
Read MoreEvery now and then, someone with chalk and a purpose, or a marker and determination, will take over a patch of sidewalk, or the boarding around a construction site, and share their thoughts with us passers-by.
Read MoreThese small moments are the ones that keep us coming back for more… to re-watch the movies they’re in, and to explore movies we don’t know, or don’t yet know, in order to enlarge ourselves and our lives.
Read MoreThose novelists. They sure know how to get you. Pick up that book at the bookstore and begin to read at your peril. Here are a few of my favorite openers for your consideration.
Read MoreI offer, and they seem, silently, glad of my help. But there are three return addresses they point to on the well-folded, well-creased envelope they thrust in my direction. One in Queens, one in Brooklyn, and one on Lafayette Street. I direct them to the latter. It’s closer. But they don’t want that.
Read MoreDanish author Glenn Ringtved was back in NY recently. He walked, a lot. And I walked with him, a little…
Read MoreI tried a Madeleine the other day, not from a diner, mind you, but a reputable French bakery. This was after a treat of a posh-lunch at Le Grenouille with my friend Anita, and an almost sublime heaven taste of a meal. I’d thought the final touch of that lemon cookie would send me bolting down 52nd Street to find a pad and pencil and start a literary hadj that would wind me up somewhere grand. But I was, in truth, too full to bolt just then. So I thought I’d try a little later.
Read MoreStuck on the train outside Newark. Snow and sleet pouring down, mostly sleet. My seatmate, who works in advertising, is reading James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Read MoreMostly, I’ve given up being helpful. I have stopped trying to guide the lost, with their noses iPhone-glued on street corners, wondering which way the blue dot is trending, because their answer is usually a “no, I’m fine” growl. Me and my machine, we've got it covered. Also men, of course, feel very threatened by a stranger who might suggest their sense of direction is wussy. So I stopped. For the most part.
Read MoreDriving south into rural Maryland the four-lane highway, dotted with traffic lights, cleaves through strip malls offering the usual rural services in a recovering economy: bail bonds, pawn brokers, mortgage re-financing, pay day loans, and self- storage. It was the latter—sitting with my foot on the brake at a really long red light—that caught my attention.
Read MoreHow could we forget? All those happy singing voices in the car, tiring of enumerating the 99 bottles of beer, moving into "My bologna has a first name …
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