People sometimes ask if I’ve thought about publishing a selection of my blogs in book form.  Naturally, I’m flattered, just as I am when they suggest my novels would make great movies. Such notions don’t swell my head. Steven Spielberg, I know, won’t be calling soon. 

Recently, my mother celebrated her 100th birthday.  I took her to lunch at a restaurant we’d frequented over the years.  The proprietor doesn’t open in the afternoons, but for us he did. To make the occasion festive, I brought a  balloon and birthday cards sent by my friends wh

I take my mother to lunch every Friday. At 97 she likes to stroll the mall to see the latest fashions. Passing a cosmetics counter she’ll often say, “I think it’s time to renew myself.” We pause over the glass display until a crisp looking salesgirl comes forward. She offers u

I’ve  always been a cautious driver and age hasn’t improved my courage.  Knowing  my reaction times are slowing,  my hearing fading and my periphery vision narrowing, I take extra precautions, which include driving at the lawful speed even if the road ahead is

Appropriate to the season, a friend gave me a gift certificate to Powell’s bookstore.  Overjoyed, I hurried off to use it before it got lost in the midst of my move to the retirement center.  Choosing a book wasn’t hard.  I keep a list on my refrigerator door. 

A reader wrote to say she had some questions about Alice Munro’s short story, “Wenlock Edge,” and wondered if I had any insights.  Curious, I read the story then searched for reviewer’s remarks on the web.  I found few.  One commentator did point out that the tr

Events around the globe don’t seem to be pointing to a bright future. Besides polluting the environment, we seem bent on killing each other.  Perhaps that’s why the number of articles about how to stay happy seems to be multiplying faster than rabbits in old Mr. McGregor’s

When Stephen Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time  came out several years ago, someone hid money at the back of one copy to see if anyone  got to the end of this complex work on cosmology.  The book hit the best seller list and remained there for 4 years, but no on

I’ve never read a book by John Updike, mainly because he was never required in college and I identified him with “the boys,” who included Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and touching upon Ernest Hemmingway and Norman Mailer, writers whom I have read but whose world view I don’t much

“Getting knocked down is one thing—being a coward is something else.” So says, Sally Field who knows a thing or two about getting knocked down. She won her first Academy Award for her performance in the film, Norma Rae, (1979) but it was a role for which she was not the studio�