Clutching my passport, wheeling recalcitrant suitcases, collecting misplaced paraphernalia, and searching for door C on level three, I barely had time for a goodbye hug with friend Heath before I was on my way home. The past twelve days of constant companionship had become telescoped into a quick slip of time. Thought and emotion became…
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been in contact with a good friend from my Inchbald Design School days. We have been organizing a trip to meet up with friends in London. While planning our itinerary, we’ve spent time stitching together memories of trips we took together in the years after school. Distance and time…
I am not what anyone would call a spontaneous individual. The pattern of my life for the most part has bordered on the somnolent. So it came as a shock to me-myself-and-I, as well as those who knew me back then, that I should leave behind a successful career in Library-Land to pursue a degree…
Well, I managed to splatter myself face first on a perfectly benign sidewalk. And contrary to popular belief, my life did not flash before my eyes. It was nevertheless, quite a spectacular fall. Due to extenuating circumstances, it is beyond my capacity to relate the entire sequence of events leading up to my pratfall in…
Oy gevalt! Please save me from my fantasy life. Much as I might wish it to be possible, there really is no way I shall ever be mistaken for a sophisticated world traveler sitting at ease in a sidewalk café in Firenze conversing in fluent Italian with passers-by. For one thing, I shall never again…
Last year at this time I was dithering about what I needed to do before we left for Italy. Granted the prospects of travel were diminishing exponentially every day, as the pandemic took hold of the world. But at that time there was still what we thought might be a sliver of an opportunity, or…
Memory can be a slick shyster … a Monte Bank adept at shuffling our recollection of events, be they ghastly or awesome. Really gruesome events remain vivid for a time and then, if we are lucky, fade and lose their sharp edges. They are no less powerful, but their grip eases as our lives move…
I took this photo years ago while in Maine. I have kept it along with a few other special images that show up whenever I go into my photo gallery. Mostly I transfer new photos out of the gallery into storage files, and see them again only when I go searching. So, why keep this particular…
Sorry to say, our lovely two-week trip to Florence has been cancelled … yet another casualty of the coronavirus wars. We kept thinking that it might work out, but as you all know there is no future in planning for the future right now. It certainly feels as if life’s highway is chock-a-block with roadkill.…
Just a heads up … It turns out that as a toddler, I missed the lesson on left and right. As a result … do not act upon any spontaneous directions you might receive from me, unless those directions are reinforced with hand signals, such as tapping on the passenger window while yelling, “Take the…