WARNING: do not read if details about tooth problems give you collywobbles. When I turned 21, my father took me out to dinner and gave me a piece of Fatherly Advice: take care of your teeth. This was more heartfelt even than it might have been, since Dad had, for about 20 years, neglected his teeth, and the bill, in every imaginable sense, had recently come due. I inherited many sterling qualities from my parents. I don’t know which one gifted me with my teeth (I suspect my father, but… Read more Teeth →
I run a small museum. It’s a museum on the history of the book, and of bookbinding, and one of the things we talk about when talking about the book… Read more A Set of Dickens on the Whatnot →
My father made it to almost-98, sharp as a tack the whole time (as near as I can tell, all his very long-lived siblings did except for the youngest one, who had some sort of dementia in the last few years of her life). My mother died relatively young, but was reasonably sharp. However, my father’s mother (seen left) also had dementia for as long as I knew her (I was 14 when she died, and felt deeply swindled by fate, listening to all the stories about a Grannie Annie… Read more Creak, Memory →
I was thirteen when we moved from New York City to Sheffield, Massachusetts. There were many striking differences, but one of the big ones? Transportation. Unbeknownst to my mother, I had been secretly taking the subway to school in the mornings (this meant an additional 15 minutes of sleep, for the bargain price of ten cents a day…yeah, it was a while ago). In the mornings I would run to the IRT station and jam myself and my armload of textbooks in among a zillion of my fellow citizens (this… Read more I Was Raised in a Barn: Cars →
I had a co-worker some time ago, relatively young and new to the workforce, who, over the time we worked in the same company, got the No habit bad. There… Read more The Habit of No →
I think I was 14 when I read Robert Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon. One of the world-building details was that in this society many people went armed (almost all of… Read more A Civil Society →
I was once chased around my parents’ kitchen by a friend of my father’s. But I’ll come back to that. One of my favorite things to do when I was… Read more Notice, Class, How Angela Circles… →
It was perhaps a mistake to re-read A Wrinkle in Timebefore I saw the movie, but I hadn’t read the book in a few decades. I enjoyed it, picked up… Read more I Want(ed) to Believe →
