Over the past year, a slew of shady salespeople has been hounding me by phone and through emails, trying to lure me to accept their dubious invitations to engage in whatever organizations they represent, promising me fame and fortune if I’ll only listen to their...
My teenage son wants to move to the snow. He’s tired of the balmy beach life where the temps rarely go below 40 degrees and where golf carts are street legal. Over the years, in his young mind, he’s determined that coastal people (read, girls) tend to be shallow and...
Twice during my youth, I spent the school year in Jerusalem, Israel with my family while my high-school teacher father was on Sabbatical leave. I turned 7 the first trip and then celebrated my 15th birthday the second time. Although my father taught my younger sister...
It goes without saying that I love words. I love using colorful, weighty words and I love learning new words. Not necessarily new new words—the ones that have been recently added to Merriam-Webster—but old new words. Legacy words that have been...
It’s that time of year again when we reflect on what has transpired during the past 11 months. What went right, what went wrong and what steps we’ll take to change things in the coming year. Like previous years, 2022 seemed to accelerate uncontrollably after Halloween...
No matter what beliefs we hold, nothing prepares us for death. Even the most spiritual among us become distraught when we hear that someone close to us is dying. Whether the person is elderly, having lived a full, wonderful life, and having died of old age, we still...
