When I was a youngster, one of my scariest memories was a scene from Snow White.  The huntsman’s shadow falling over the princess with a dagger was not it.  Nor was it the scene where the queen tempts her stepdaughter with a  poisoned apple.  What made me shiver was the old woma

No long after I moved into my retirement center,  I found myself visiting a new friend in the assisted living section.  As he and I talked, a woman joined us.  I judged her to be in her 90s, though she had the svelte body of a dancer and a pretty face.  I asked if she’d ever bee

The hiatus from my blog, gave me a little time to observe the comings and goings of my fellow inmates at the retirement center. One or two had dropped from the scene, literally, having taken unexpected falls that required surgery or prolonged bed rest. I saved another from a similar f

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a memoir. Not the story of my life.  Nothing is so extraordinary in my existence that it merits a book.  But a booklet about my four years abroad might be of interest to others.  I left for Europe in the early 1960s and returned nearly fo

One of the important issues in the 21st Century is how to preserve personal privacy. Microsoft, for example, is offering Windows 10 for free but in exchange, its default setting gives the software permission to “pass your data to Microsoft’s servers, gobble up your bandwidth and p

A while ago, I wrote a blog mourning the passing of Tony Hillerman (9/25/12) and how, unlike him, many writers of mystery novels give us complex plots but protagonists with little depth. They forget readers have to care about their sleuths, enough to make them flinch when the door to

Turning the last page of the August edition of Money Magazine, I noticed an article, “Money Well Spent,” written by a quilter, Cindy Dawn. (2015 pg. 84). In 1983, while doing her military service in Germany, she stumbled upon the sale of a Pfaff sewing machine. She was 24 and hadn

Recently, I discovered that on Amazon’s book rankings, the works of John Keats and William Wordsworth are listed 796,426 and 2,337,250 respectively, only slightly higher than mine. (“Counter Culture,” by Caleb Crain, Harper’s, July 2015 pg.82.)  Naturally, I, a modest wr

Situational dynamics is a proven way to seduce  good people into doing bad things, a discovery that began as an experiment and was later documented in The Lucifer Effect, by Phillip Zimbardo in 2007.  The study upon which the book was based, and which will be dramatized this month a

Yesterday, I had lunch with my retirement center gaggle of men, all over 90. (Blog 7/15/15)  As the day was sunny, they were seated near a window.  One had ordered a bowl of soup; the other sat before a cup of coffee; a third had grabbed a boiled egg from the salad counter.  When m