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An Angel in Pet Heaven
After nearly seven years as our pet, our guinea pig Angel died two days ago. We knew this day was coming. Angel was at the upper end of the actuarial tables for guinea pigs; we know of many fellow guinea pig owners who had far less time with them. Guinea pigs are in the same […]
‘It Must Be Around Here Somewhere’
Is the above statement the story of your life? It’s the mantra for those who constantly misplace things. Are you one of them? Today I murmured it when I couldn’t find a shopping bag filled with costumes that I promised to alter for an upcoming school play. They showed up in my car’s trunk after […]
Excuse Me While I Wine a Bit
I gave up wine more than a month ago, just before all those great studies that announced how great it is for you and how you should have at least a glass a day for optimum health. Red wine is just part of the alchemy – along with fruits, veggies, olive oil and fish – […]
Should We Part With Family Relics?
On Monday the New York Times published a column from a Baby Boomer who was conflicted over whether to part with a mink coat that had once been her mother’s. It sent me upstairs to look at two of my own family relics, which I don’t use but hold onto for totally different reasons. I’m […]
Yahoo! Now We Have To Re-Vamp the Work Wardrobe
This week I read two disturbing bits of news. One is that Yahoo! and Best Buy are rethinking their policy on letting employees work from home. The other is a column in the New York Times’ “Booming” section about how middle-aged people have begun to fret about looking old the same way their 23-year-old selves […]
Goodbye, Wild Thing
BBC radio woke us at 5:30 a.m. today, and the first thing I heard was that Reg Henry, lead singer of the Troggs, passed away yesterday. He was 71 and had battled lung cancer. Everybody remembers the Troggs’ oft-played garage anthem, “Wild Thing,” which shot up to number one and still never fails to stir, […]
Throwing Rosa Parks From the Train
The train conductor resembled how Lee Harvey Oswald might have looked in late middle age: white, wiry, angry-looking. He prowled rather than strolled the aisles as he took our tickets, wearing the wary and ready-to-shoot face of a cop looking for an escaped felon in an abandoned building. The passenger was also middle-aged, but black, […]
Street Names: Getting You Where You Live
Would you ever want to live at an address that sounds less than picturesque? Or that sounds scary, shady, tawdry or downright ugly? I ask this because I recently finished a story for our local paper on the history of street names in our town. It got me thinking about how the millions of streets […]
Don’t Get Too Comfortable
I think that there’s a reason that most animals hibernate during the dead of winter. After the holiday merriment and the whirlwind of celebrations and obligations, January stretches out before us like a vast polar plain, and it doesn’t look that bad. It’s a time to unplug all that brightly blinking gaiety; lay on the […]
Neither Newly Wed, Nor Nearly Dead
Over the past few months we’ve received a number of brochures in the mail sent by companies who assume that we are either very old and/or very wealthy. Has anyone else had this problem? Many of these mailings are glossy brochures advertising Viking river cruises to Prague, Budapest and other exotic and far-off places, with […]
