When I was growing up I took piano lessons from a delightful short, round and ancient Franciscan nun named Sister Adeline. She had seen Paderewski play when she was a child, she told me,...
Dubby. That was my grandma’s word for the feeling when you fall hard asleep in the afternoon and wake up feeling disoriented. “I feel so dubby,” she would say after a nap. My grandmother...
Collywobbles. Those fuzzball things that appear in corners, under beds or chairs, next to the desk. My mother called them collywobbles, though sometimes she referred to them as old men. At my childhood neighbor’s...
You know how you’re thinking about someone and shortly afterwards the phone rings — or your email or text inbox dings — and it’s that person? It seems to me that the more I open...
I dreamed last night that someone mailed me a stack of receipts — from restaurants, theaters, all sorts of places we had gone. When I got them in the mail, in my dream I...
A stray cat recently took up residence in the crawl space under our front porch. We asked around, looking for a possible owner and then did what common wisdom advises against: I put food...
Back to the Witness Protection Program man one more time. When he was transplanted here my WPP guy initially owned a pizza parlor. He sold it and decided — or decided with the government...
Two weeks ago when I was on vacation, I went out the door of my mother in law’s condo and headed for the park across the street. I had just started out when I...
We had a little white dog named Barney who lived to be ancient. He and I adored one another, we were like Velcro. If there were ever a world disaster and things rationed, I...
Last summer my neighbor up the road stopped me as I was walking past. “Me and Joanne got everything we need,” he said. “We got enough money, we got a nice house. We even...
