I’ve meant to read the British author Rachel Cusk for some time. She’s been praised by critics and awarded literary prizes throughout a writing career that has spanned twelve novels and several books of nonfiction. She writes about women, in contrast to another author I recently discovered, David Szalay, who writes about men. I probably should have started with Cusk’s acclaimed trilogy, Outline...
The House on the Bay
Since the day I was old enough to stray from my mother’s watchful eye and wander off from our blanket spread on the sandy, modest public beach at Thunder Bay on the shore of Lake Erie in Canada, I would take beach walks along the curve of the bay. Walk east, and you come across Root Beer Creek, so named by us for its water color. Walk west, and you come across a flat rock area abutting the shore...
The Tarnished Em Dash
One of my favorite punctuation marks—the em dash—(see what I did there?) is under siege. I’ve made liberal use of the em dash in all five of my novels, deploying it early and often in my writing style: STASH (page 1): “But she reminded herself that Nora was only seven, a loving, intelligent girl, tall and strong and for the most part capable, yet fearful of small things going wrong—such as...
The Mountains are Calling
Our hiking season begins on a perfectly pleasant day on the shoulder between Spring and Summer. Mild temps, verdant landscape, stream crossings, muddy spots, flitting bugs. Jimmy and I wanted to ease our way in, so we picked a hike of about six miles that would get us to the top of two of the highest Catskill peaks—Blackhead and Black Dome. Color of the day: green. But memory can lead us astray...
Love Song for a Second Chance
I saw you standing at the cornerLast night at First and ParkI lagged behind so we wouldn’t meetUntil you vanished in the dark Then you spot me all aloneAt the bar of our favorite jointYou walk out before I turn aroundbecause really what’s the point We never claimed we’d meet once more, by design or circumstanceWho can guess the future, who wants a second chance. We wrote a story the end was sadWe...
Gratulationes
It’s a diploma, I know that much. And although my Latin is mighty rusty, in fact nonexistent, my best translation is this: You’ve done one hell of a job and on behalf of this university, your professors, mentors, family, and friends, we congratulate you, we honor you, we admire your keen intelligence, dedication, creativity, and hard work, and please know that trees everywhere are bowing their...
Hedonic Adaptation
I only recently discovered a term for a phenomenon I’ve experienced many times, one we’ve all experienced—hedonic adaptation. I’ve known about hedonism, which is living to maximize pleasure, and I’m acquainted with several hedonists who have devoted their lives to pleasure, but hedonic adaptation is new for me. Hedonic adaptation is the process by which we tend to return to our baseline level...
Use It or Lose It
I know first-hand about “use it or lose it” syndrome. After I stopped doing pull-ups due to a shoulder injury, when I was finally ready to try again, I could barely get myself above the bar. I used to be able to make myself understood speaking French, but having left Switzerland decades ago I’m now reduced to little more than “Bonjour” and “Au revoir.” We all experience “use it or lose it.” The...
The Movie Club Rules
The first rule of the Dad’s Movie Club is that we have to follow all of the rules. We have many of them. Rule #5: Movie night shall occur on the second Wednesday of every month, unless a special exception is granted in a given month and all three officers unanimously agree to the exception, which has happened only once when movie night fell on my wedding anniversary and we voted to go on Tuesday...
These Two Mothers
Today I honor the two most influential mothers in my life: my mother, Irene Klein, and my life partner and mother to Julia and Owen, Harriet Jaffe. Irene It’s been more than forty years since I’ve had a mother. I have only the same few memories of my mother; many are foggy. I can form no new ones. And many memories are long forgotten. But I know this: I loved my mom deeply. I felt a strong...
Why So Unhappy?
In the 2025 World Happiness Report, the United States dropped to its lowest ranking since that survey began. The U.S. ranked 24th out of 147 countries, a decline from its 15th-place ranking in 2023 and its highest ranking of 11th place in 2012. The low score can be attributed by the unhappiness of people under the age of 30. While the U.S. was 24th overall, for people aged 20-30, we were...
M’aidez on May Day
It gives me a boost to know that across the country people were engaged in mass protests today against the Trump authoritarian regime. May 1—known as May Day—is the perfect opportunity to take to the streets. May Day has a long association with pagan and spring festivals in Europe dating back to the Roman Empire, and has become synonymous with the labor movement in the last 150 years. In 1889 an...
On Sale Through Mother’s Day
Mother’s Day is just around the corner and I’m sure you know a mom who loves to read. What better for a mom than a page-turning family saga? Now through Mother’s Day, my novels In Flight and The Suitor are available on sale for only $12! That’s right, hours of reading pleasure for your favorite mom. Doesn’t she deserve the best? Click on the cover images and order your copies today—you’ll have...
Doing vs. Being
I’m rethinking an adage I’ve often believed in: you are what you do. The novelist Annie Dillard best encapsulated this concept when she wrote: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” Dillard reinforces the concept that our lives consist of what we do with our time. The word “do” places the spotlight on...
Sinners
In my continuing effort to support our only local theater, the Spectrum, that screens independent, classic, and cult-status films along with first-run mainstream movies, we went to see Sinners the other night. What a crazy, highly entertaining fusion of Horror, Western, Musical, Period Piece, Black genre, and Thriller. It sounds like it can’t work. It worked! Ryan Coogler, who directed Black...
Detached, But Such Is Life
It’s been a while since I’ve found a novel so compelling that I knocked off one hundred pages a day and finished reading the book in three days. Flesh, by David Szalay, is that novel. A reviewer in The Guardian wrote that Flesh is “a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive; about what, if anything, it means to amble through time in a machine made of meat.” The...
Villanelle #2: Swan Song
As I wrote in my previous post, Villanelle #1, a villanelle poem adheres to a strict form. It comprises nineteen lines—five tercets of three lines each, and one four-line quatrain at the end. There is a fixed rhyming pattern, and the first and third lines of the opening tercet are called the refrain and are repeated alternately in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas. In the final stanza, the...
The Rabbit Hex
Winter felt long and imagine my pleasure seeing the first brave flowers of spring, these snowdrops stretching and opening between a crack in the rocks. I was so excited I wrote about it. And then visited another harbinger of spring: rabbits. Those darn bunny rabbits ate my pretty flowers down to the bone. “Curse you, dastardly rabbits!” In an earlier era, we didn’t have a rabbit problem. We had...
Got Wet at Hands Off
Nature handed us cold, wind, and rain the entire time, and yet the turnout for Hands Off at the New York State Capitol looked to be several thousand Americans who are sick and tired of an authoritarian administration run by a cruel, amoral, abusive, lying felon and his billionaire enablers. Despite the weather, the crowd was enthusiastic, the signs plentiful and creative. The faces I saw were...
The Season Shifts
I savor each season in its turn and yet I wait for the first sign of the next, the emerald tree canopy of summer, the crisp red leaves of autumn, the first snowflakes from the sky, and now, finally—I’ve been looking, waiting, hoping—the nascent blooms of spring I spotted today, elbowing their way through cracks between the rocks, insisting on their due of sunshine, and time ceaselessly shifts...