My friend, Ann, suffers from dementia. This is the way I prefer to say it, rather than she has dementia. Having something implies an ownership of and intimacy with, a kind of never-ending entanglement that can but won’t be relinquished. It implies choice. If she has dementia, can’t she let go her grasp and unhave it? If she suffers from it, that’s her...
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Like many of us in our fair city, I came here from somewhere else. Or as we say in New England, I’m from away. I’m not actually from New England, though it wasn’t until recently I learned New York City was not part of New England. I don’t honestly know what it’s part of. New Yorkers don’t worry about things like that. Friends are initially astonished when...
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I first met Carmen twenty years ago when she lived on the corner of Third and Rose in a purple mobile home. We squeezed in at the kitchen table to study English while her three young kids came and went, hungry or cranky, needing this and that. I was a lousy English teacher, but despite my shortcomings, time did the work. We met at her kitchen table for ten...
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Consider the southpaw. She lives at first base, tends toward artistic genius, is only ten percent of the population but has occupied the White House six times in the last twelve presidencies. She is scorned, reviled, regarded with the utmost suspicion. In the Romance languages, she shares a Latin root with the word “sinister.” I’d like to shed some light...
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When I was a chubby six-year-old, I had a starring role in a little-known horror film called Blood and Guts. It was written, directed and filmed by a man whose friends and co-workers never suspected his Hitchcockian tendencies. He even had a walk-on role in the movie, á la Hitchcock, in which he played the part of a buxom nanny. This man was my father. We...
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