Notes from the Crapper

I once bought a Yiddish music CD from Amazon. It was a third-party vendor. When I opened the package and took out the CD, I found it contained a Margaret Cho comedy CD. I always wondered if someone ordered the Margaret Cho CD and got the Yiddish music…I decided to keep it. Technically I don’t qualify for a […]

Mr Meadows

My first day of high school was hijacked by Mr. Meadows, my freshman history teacher. He was all anyone talked about, particularly before lunch. As soon as I began to hear the stories, I looked at my schedule and lo and behold…Meadows, 9th period. Great… He was the teacher boogieman to end all teacher boogiemen. His stock-in-trade was World Cultures. His […]

Walking and CHewing Gum

I worked in academia for many years. I knew a number of people who rode the genius fence. Those folks ranged from really, really smart people who have genius abilities to people who are crazy-ass geniuses who can’t understand why anyone would need to walk and chew gum. It’s both a privilege and an annoyance to know them. Great […]

Fleeting Thoughts

11/2021 My gallbladder recently survived a second threat of eviction from my organ community. It was going to be yet another emergency operation. For better or worse it didn’t happen. I’ve had an impressive number of surgeries. I’ve been put under using a number of different types of anesthesia. As I was pondering yet another “insult” to my body […]

The Only Kid My Mother Got a Complaint About from Another Parent…

I have an older and younger brother, the middle girl child between two boys. It’s an oddly precarious birth position. I could play sports and dolls. The 60’s and 70’s weren’t easy for a non-conforming girl…and I don’t mean in a sex/gender way…I mean in non-conforming attitude and behavior. Maybe non-compliant is a better word. There were constant mixed messages […]

Scaling THorny Walls

Fairy tale characters always appeared to have a pretty tough time fighting dragons and scaling thorny walls no matter their goal. If the character’s story is set somewhere vaguely in the central or eastern parts of Europe, the dragons often seemed to be angrier and the walls higher and more treacherous. Or maybe during the time […]

My MOther’s Attic

I was the kid my mother took me “junk shopping” from an early age. My brothers weren’t interested and while my dad was known to appreciate and even purchase old furniture and other items, my mother was a pro. Yard sales, antique stores, flea markets, you name it, we walked it. I could find things for nickels, dimes, […]

Otherworldly CREATURES AT THE HOTEL POOL

I can’t remember where we were or what hotel we were staying at but that might be the perfect background to this experience. My husband travels a good bit for business and accumulates hotel points we use for family trips. We’ve had some interesting experiences but one in particular came to mind today. My younger daughter […]

Silence and Sepia

My husband and I went with some friends to see the 1923 version of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Lon Chaney…the original Lon Chaney stars. Silent and sepia, accompanied by a Robert Morton theater organ (installed in 1928), the organist Clark Wilson played an exceptional score that felt so natural we forgot the film was […]

Super Powers

I have this theory…I have a lot of theories frankly. I’ve been thinking about super powers and how pretty much everyone has at least one super power. Not all super powers are sexy and marketable and some are downright strange but they are there all the same. Maybe your ability to make a moist poppyseed bread is otherworldly, […]