Stories, Essays and Commentary.
Tags: history, literature, memoir, other places
Note: A revised version of an essay I posted on July 4, 2016 after my wife and I traveled to Italy. Is it lack of imagination that makes us come to imagined places, not just stay at home? —Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel” I concluded the
Tags: history, memoir, morality and justice
Is it possible to like your banker? If any writer can make finance interesting, it’s Ron Chernow, author of the celebrated Alexander Hamilton (2004). One way he worked his magic in an earlier book on the history of finance was to assign it a title
Tags: censorship, disability, friendship, memoir, morality and justice, other places, people in my life, well-being and medical
1 Even though I used to find public speaking a nightmare, I consented to be the senior speaker at my Amherst College commencement. I say “consented” because I’d promised Andy, the friend who nominated me, that I would go ahead if elected, as I was.
Tags: aging, family, literature, memoir, whimsy
That Friday afternoon last month, a Green-Wood Cemetery employee named Katie escorted Laura and me as we toured options for our future remains. We walked from buildings to open areas with ponds and vistas, on to another building, and then to yet
Tags: friendship, memoir, people in my life, poetry
1 Bonnie and I were close my freshman year of college, her senior year at a neighboring women’s college. She came from a traditional military family and had traveled around the world, not just with her family—in fact, mostly on her own. My feelings
Tags: family, in memorium, memoir, memory
The gulf in experience between Grandma Spratt and me is captured in two words from her letter of July 18, 1977: “at Wisconsin.” She lived in the town of Darlington, England. When I was four, my parents, brother and I, who were all born there, moved