In this short recollection, I am attending a school in London at the age of eight or nine. I’d had a cleft palate surgically repaired when I was too young to remember, and now I was required to undergo speech therapy. Looking back, I marvel at the
Memoir
A Perfect Love
In September, here in Brooklyn, there will be a summer-warm afternoon, heavy with moisture, when an autumn front approaches. Above me is that sky that made May and June beautiful, fragrant with flower scents and optimism, but that by now has become
The Only Time I Ran for Office
Darien High School’s chess club, of which I was one of seven members, met to elect a new president. I'd begun at the club two years earlier by beating another new member twice in a row. My opponent, Jeff, now a senior like me, turned out to be our
Monty
As a wedding gift, Grandma Spratt gave my parents a cat from a litter born in her backyard. He was black except for a white stripe on his chest, and Mum and Dad named him Monty. They said that when I was born two years later, they’d worried they’d
A Time for Euphemisms
1 Toward the end of eighth grade, when kids turn fourteen, a girl I’ll call Delia volunteered to visit my home one afternoon a week to read class assignments to me. I was new to America and to blindness. During our reading sessions, work gave way to
Bullying: What’s a Parent To Do?
1 My most painful experience of bullying occurred in a taxi. Each day for two years, from the age of eleven to thirteen, I shared a taxi with three or four other children to and from school. Why the taxi? We were in the first group of partially