One of my favorite Shakespearian lines comes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Puck says to his Lord, “What fools these mortals be.” (Act iii, Scene 2.)  He spoke at a time before psychiatry existed, and no one had coined the term cognitive dissonance disorder.  

A few days ago, I left my hairdresser’s shop feeling happy. When a woman’s hair looks good, she feels good, too. Then I reached my car and discovered my keys were missing. Suddenly I felt as if I’d swallowed a live gerbil. Of course, my keys had to be near. I’d driven to the s

“What kind of a woman are you?” Henri Matisse screamed at his model as he stood before his canvass.  He and dozens of other Parisian painters in the 1920s, Chagall, Cocteau and Braque among them, would never find out.  Only Picasso refused to paint Mari Lani, a model who became

When I turned 39, I received my first letter from AARP.  Looking down at the envelope, I was stunned.  Me?  Middle Aged?  There’d been a mistake. If my response seemed melodramatic, then, imagine how I reacted when a crematorium invited me to lunch, recently. My heart stopped. �

Someone on Facebook posted a clip about a woman who’d found an injured bee and decided to take care of it.  In return for her kindness, the creature responded with a trust near to affection.  This cross-species communication opened the woman to a new perspective on life.  (Click)

A friend called me on a Sunday, responding to a birthday message I’d sent. As friends do, we caught up on each other’s lives and then made suggestions about books to read and movies to see. I recommend the films, August: Osage County and Blue Jasmine, both of which are films with

In pursuit of yesterday’s blog about growing old, I pause here not only to celebrate the 100th birthday of Beat Generation poet,  Lawrence Ferlinghetti, but also the publication of his new book, Little Boy: A Novel Unlike other writers in the pantheon of literary history, Ferlinghe

Was it madness or was there method in it?  That is a question political historians far into the future will ponder as they assess the conduct of America’s 45th President.  Several months ago, I raised the potential for his madness on a local talk show, comparing Donald Trump’s p

Sometimes, the good old days were just that: good. Doctors made home visits — a blessing when the weather was frightful and you had a temperature of 102.  In the good old days, when the thermometer hit triple digits, a kid like me could grab shards from the back of an ice truck

 Proving a negative is next to impossible but R. G. Price, author of the new book, Deciphering the Gospel, attempts to do just that.  He argues Jesus Christ never existed. Price is no Biblical scholar.  He’s a software engineer and data analyst.  Still, being an amateur didn’t