Freedom and Goldenrod

A month ago, I wrote about atonement, asking my daughter Jessica to go for a walk and making amends. That conversation, rescheduled due to Jessica’s sick cat and other obligations, happened this past weekend. In between, on her recommendation, I read my daughter’s...

Restlessness

Completing a months-long project, meeting a difficult goal, walking out of a final exam, filing a major brief, an institution-wide evaluation or a huge end-of-the-year report, and you feel elated, yahoo, relieved, whew, right? Not me, unless you include tired,...

Atonement

When I lived in Baltimore, my neighborhood book club read Ian McEwan’s Atonement. A few years later, I saw the movie. Ah, if only I could write with McEwan’s fine precision and capture the film’s brilliant cinematographic scenes. But there was a problem: I hated the...

Right and Busy

How to grow up in one piece, a 40-page book of quirky advice about people and everyday things, is one of my all-time favorite books. Read by adults but written as if for the uninitiated, that is, for children, Robert Paul Smith’s humor permeated my youth in the...

Are you liberated?

One chilly winter night some forty years ago during my college years, I was upstairs in a Boston dance club on Beacon Street looking around for someone I’d like to ask me to dance. Two young, strapping fellows about my age promptly swam into view, approaching...