At the retirement center, I sank into a chair opposite a man who once had a distinguished career. Knowing he wasn’t a loquacious individual, I started the conversation, asking how he’d spent his afternoon.  “Reading,” he replied.  “It passes the hours.” The previous day,

  Bigfoot isn’t likely to be hiding in the forests surrounding Mt. Hood in Oregon.  Even so, scientists speculate many of earth’s smaller creatures are waiting to be discovered.  One portion of the earth that until now has been beyond human reach is the Twilight Zone, ocean

I’ve told this story before. Theodore Dreiser gave a lecture at a university where a young man seated in the audience was writing his doctorate on Dreiser’s, Sister Carrie. After the presentation, the student collared the author to talk about his dissertation, hoping to validate h

  The ferry bobbed in the six-foot waves like a match stick caught in a wash cycle. While the storm outside raged, inside, passengers huddled in the middle rows of the vessel’s viewing area, away from wind gusts that could break the glass. Together, the people, white-lipped

The older I get, the more I fall behind the modern culture.  For example, while taping a Just Read It segment on Colm Toibin’s fictionalized biography of Thomas Mann, I was stunned to learn that one of my young guests knew little about one of the twentieth century’s greatest

Recently, I learned a bumble bee is a fish. California, wanting to extend environmental protection to pollinators, tucked them under laws pertaining to scaly creatures. What did the two have in common? According to officials, both were invertebrates. Ingenious!  As a writer and forme

Three men meet daily to bury the dead in Bucha, Ukraine. No one pays them.  They perform their task in the name of humanity. They’ve been at their work for many months, even during a period of Russian occupation. Glad to be free of the gruesome task, the invaders tolerated the men�

Browsing the internet, I discovered a story concerning identical twins. They were separated when one of them was lost in a market and never returned to her South Korean family.  Instead, an American couple adopted her and brought her to the United States.  Years later, when she was

The woman sitting in the coffee shop opposite me had once been my English student.  She’s in her seventies now and I am halfway through my eighties.  From time to time, she assists me with some of my writing projects. Recently, she did a final edit of my memoir which I began in 20