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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
For as long as I’ve been a writer, I’ve kept a notebook, filling dozens of them over the years. Some I still have, others I’ve mislaid or tossed. My notebooks, both the online and paper versions, serve a hybrid function—as a fiction workplace for story ideas, character sketches, plot premises, what-ifs; and also as a therapy couch for my thoughts and feelings, for the highlights and lowlights of...
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is the U.S. scientific and regulatory agency that studies and predicts changes in the environment. The agency’s mission includes weather forecasts, storm warnings, and climate monitoring. Management of coastal and marine ecosystems. Prevention and control of invasive species. International cooperation. NOAA also collects, analyzes, and...
The scent of certain simmering sauce transforms me into that child, that teen, again. I arrive home from school, maybe on a cold, slushy day, I push open the heavy door and immediately I know. My mother turns from the stove in her striped apron and wooden spoon. Sauce tonight. Or it’s a spring day and the windows are open, I’m dragging down the last block to my house after two hours on the water...
It’s never too late to go back to school to learn something new, and with that in mind I enrolled in the UC Berkeley course “Wealth and Poverty” taught by the economist Robert Reich. The course consisted of fourteen lectures, recorded in a classroom at Berkeley in 2023, and is now free to the public. Reich in action teaching his class. Reich worked in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford...
The police stopped by my house today. I happened to be looking out the window when the unmarked sedan pulled into the driveway. I say unmarked because the car didn’t have the aggressive black and white badging of Bethlehem’s patrol cars, although the matte-black Challenger with the extra antenna and “hidden” lights on the grill and inside the windshield is obviously a law enforcement vehicle. Two...
