It’s California 1956. Land of pink, baby blue and gold-flocked Christmas trees spun with silver tinsel. The sun is warm. The trees are real but take on the aura of Walt Disney’s Fantasyland, where we all flocked for a dose of wanting to be in another place and time. ...
1. My very first memory is a Christmas memory. I was two and three-quarters, in the words of a 1967 me. My father, a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy, was in Vietnam. My mother was at St. Luke’s Hospital, giving birth to her third child and first son. Teenage boy...
“Don’t sweat the small stuff,” they say, followed quickly by, “It’s all small stuff.” My list below may be small stuff, but it’s the stuff that makes my cork rise, the stuff of ahhhhh, the stuff that for a moment makes all the other nonsense melt away. An...
First sip of coffee in the morning; going to bed knowing I can drink another cup of coffee tomorrow. Saying, “Look at the sunset” to my son and watching him turn his head. Popeye’s fried chicken for dinner (from a busy location, of course, with particularly crispy...
My family is from diets. The lips, the jaws, the tongue of diets. My entire childhood was passed through the stomach of listening to my family go from one diet to the next. It was searching for The Dead Sea Scrolls, The Holy Grail or Indiana Jones and the lost...
