My transformation started innocently enough. I was scrolling through my news feed and came across this headline: “5 Zodiac Signs That Thrive Under Pressure.” The last time I paid attention to my zodiac sign was probably fifty years ago—I’m a Capricorn (December 25)—when I would read my horoscope every morning in the long-defunct Buffalo morning newspaper, The Courier Express. It was fun. Not to...
Ah, Sunday morning. Do you ever get sucked into one of those existential moments? When you’re deep in the throes of contemplation about the nature of human existence—all its mystery, uncertainty, and complexity. Its pleasure and suffering. Its beauty and horror. And you’re compelled to evaluate your role as the architect of your brief and minuscule life? They can be a struggle, these existential...
It’s been ages since the four of us have gone out for dinner, but finally the stars align and we decide to go out to celebrate some family milestones. We choose a restaurant with a good reputation that we’ve been to before and that works for all of our tastes. Some of us have a cocktail, and we order two appetizers to share and four entrees. So far, so good, except Harriet’s cocktail, although...
Today I honor the two most influential mothers in my life: my own mother, Irene Klein, and my life partner and mother to Julia and Owen, Harriet Jaffe. Irene It’s been forty years since I’ve had a mother. I have only the same few memories of my mother, and many of them 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...
All it takes is one tulip to brighten the landscape and calm my mood. Good thing, because all we got at our house is one damn tulip. One! Over the years, the deer have decimated our tulips, yet somehow the hungry buggers overlooked this one. Our one and only and likely lonely tulip. Fortunately, we have the Tulip Festival in Washington Park coming up. We went to gaze at the blooms yesterday...
The first ten seconds Riding U.S. Route 41 North, about 30 miles into a 42-mile ride around Lake Skaneateles, we’re cresting a long and tiring climb, with a sweet downhill about to unfold before us. Steve is pulling away ahead of me. John bringing up the rear flank. I don’t know what I’m thinking about, just pedaling, breathing. It’s a two-lane highway, well-paved, with a wide shoulder. On...
I found myself on the patio at the house of a guy I’d just met that day. I was among a group of people I mostly didn’t know and one of them happened to be my high school rowing coach at St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute some fifty years ago. Coach Bernie didn’t remember me, of course, but I’d had advance notice from John that he would be a participant in the group bike ride I’d been invited...
I’m helping my beloved niece, Lucy, paint her apartment bedroom. More accurately, she’s helping me. She doesn’t have experience painting a room and today I’m going to teach her. Fortunately, my sister Susan made sure the walls are prepped and ready to go. Putting on the paint is the easy, rewarding part. There are two tasks to painting a room wall: cutting in the edges using a brush and rolling...
Dandelion season is my lawn at its finest with a constellation of little golden suns on a spring green canvas. I wish it could last all summer. The blooms set at night and rise in the morning and shine all day, but only for a few weeks, and then the flowers are gone to seed, and a lucky few of them will be new suns next year.
This morning I’m standing at the starting line of the Helderberg-to-Hudson Half Marathon and asking myself the question I always do at the beginning of a race: What the hell am I doing here? I want to blame Harriet, who back in December said she was signing up to run a half and I should too. But I hadn’t run a race in ten years. I hadn’t run longer than five miles at a time. My toes are...
On this day in 1972, my father turned 45 years old. This was the year he’d been promoted to an executive position at the pharmaceutical company where he worked, and the year he moved his family of seven from a small and crowded house to a much larger house on a quiet avenue in North Buffalo. Was it also the year he began to suffer a midlife crisis? Or was he simply expressing himself? Like many...
It’s a bit of a morose group for an Easter Sunday, circa sometime in the late 1960s. Despite the background, this is not a cell block. On the right is the asbestos-laden fake brick siding on the unheated room we called the shanty at the back of my grandmother’s house in Niagara Falls. The wall on the left is the beer distributor warehouse next door. In summer, the wall is fronted by tall tomato...
It’s a bit of a morose group for an Easter Sunday. Despite the background, this is not a cell block. On the right is the asbestos-laden fake brick siding on the unheated room we called the shanty at the back of my grandmother’s in Niagara Falls. The wall on the left is the beer distributor warehouse next door. In summer, the wall is fronted by tall tomato plants with swollen red fruit. From left...
George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 is quoted more than ever these days. He writes: “Who controls the past controls the future . . .” I’m indignant about Florida rejecting a high-school Black History AP text because it made our country seem too racist. The text included lessons on abominations like slavery that apparently were too sympathetic to “them” and not sympathetic enough to “us.” In...
I’m pleased to let you know my next novel, In Flight, has been published and is available right now, right here! What’s this story about, you ask? After surviving a plane crash but suffering a trauma-induced fugue state, a successful executive and family man attempts to put his life back together while enduring the stigma of his psychological collapse. Logline: “Only in the moment of...
