Well yes, (yawn) Downton Abbey has returned for a new season on public television. I quit watching after year 3 when the heir to the estate died in a car accident. Frankly, I was never fond of any character, except Maggie Smith’s. The rest are too bland or too precious to hold
As my play, “Woman on the Scarlet Beast,” goes public, there’s another role my director is about to assume: becoming a mother. If the baby reads the calendar, it should arrive soon after the play ends. I’m hoping it is a well-behaved child and won’t arrive before it is s
I got my annual letter from Social Security the other day. Instead of going up the 2% predicted for retirees, I am going to receive $15 a month less. Oh, I got my incremental rise, like everyone else, but my medical insurance rose high enough to eat the increment. I’m not comp
Recently, I exchanged messages on Facebook with a young man from India. He’d recently lost his virginity and felt guilty, but mostly his anxiety came from not knowing how the girl felt about the experience. He didn’t love the young woman but had been carried away by his emotio
I’m sure most of us have made a computer mistake similar to the one I made recently. You punch in a password to a secure site and the computer spits it back as invalid. You try again, thinking you’ve mistyped a letter, but the machine doesn’t budge an inch. “Have you forgo
The actors are in place, the stage is set and the curtain on my play, Woman on the Scarlet Beast is about to open. Whether it will be treated kindly by the public or die in its first performance is something I am unable to predict. But whether I succeed or fail, I will have achiev
At the turn of the New Year, an acquaintance wrote a long piece on Facebook which expressed his disillusionment with the human race, accusing us of being liars and users in whom he had no trust. Needless to say, I thought his judgment overly harsh and wondered that a man with so m
Not long after I moved into my retirement center, a resident who’d learned I write novels, suggested I contribute a few to the in-house library. I declined, explaining that most of my sales were e-sales and that I made pennies per book. I couldn’t afford to give paperbacks a
Recently, a woman on my Facebook page, a leader in my community, admitted she had been abused by her father while she was growing up. Stunned by the revelation, I marveled at the manner in which she’d lived her life, holding positions of great responsibility which betrayed nothi
At one point in my political life I seriously advocated that the County Commission, of which I was a member, reserve every 3rd or 4th year to consider eliminating some of the laws on our books. My remark always earned a laugh, but I was in dead earnest. Unfortunately, when someone