During the second week of our empty-nesting, Susan and I take the train up to New York. She is accepting an award from SELF magazine as a “woman doing good.” I hang out at the hotel drafting a brief while she does publicity and makeup things at SELF. Then we head over to Riverpark, a restaurant on the East River, …
Having sold our house in Virginia, we are now renting it back from the new owners. We will do this until we move to Baltimore in July. No longer an owner of this house, I step out of the shower this morning to find a tree guy poking around in our back yard. I stick my head out the back …
I am standing with my niece in front of my father’s bureau, and I show her the gold-plated watch with the “Hamilton” typed out across its face. My father loved pocket watches and there are a couple of them still sitting on his bureau so it takes me a moment to find the right one. The watch I select is …
He was the best octopus hunter in Tolo. It was always an honor whenever he sent one of us boys out to the kiosk to buy him cigarettes: Karelia ke spirta, parakalo. It was an even bigger honor if he invited you along to hunt for octopus. He did the diving. You stayed on the surface, holding onto the octopi he …
My older son brought his girlfriend home to meet the parents. Actually, he came home from college to take care of some personal business and he brought the woman he is seeing along with him. But it has the same practical effect of something potentially more meaningful. My wife picked them up last night at the train station after I …
We have been coming to Cape Cod with my extended family now for 25 years. We came first as couples. Then we came with children. With the 13 cousins growing up and the rest of us just getting old, it is unclear how many more years we will cross the Sagamore Bridge to make this trip. Like a game of …
My wife complains about all the closet space I take up with my neckties. I do have lots of them. You see, I have this theory about ties, a theory that was finally confirmed by the guy who sells me my clothes. If you keep wearing the same tie, the tie will refuse to lie flat after a couple of …
The “Family Tree” people from Belchertown have taken down most of the big trees in my parents’ yard. My oldest sister – the one who helps my mother with her finances — hired them to do some trimming. They came back when my sister wasn’t there, again and again, each time getting my mother – always so cheerful, always so …
A number of years ago, while on vacation in Miami, my family and I were sitting in a restaurant when a man approached the table and handed my then 15-year-old daughter a paper rose. Angered by the intrusion, I took the rose from my daughter and tried to hand it back to him. The man refused to take it. …
Many of the rude words and gestures I know today I learned from driving with my father while growing up. I didn’t learn these things from my father, because I never once heard him utter a bad word. It wasn’t that using a curse word was in bad taste, though he clearly thought that too. It was that it was …