Only one of the many tomato plants growing all summer in my little garden-patch has ripened – the rest remain green. Granted the unripened are beautiful, photogenic shades of lime-green, grape-green, Moldovan-green, but green is not red is not ripe. Whose failure is it: Mother Nature? The sun or lack of? Could it be that a my tomato plants were strangled by morning(…)
My much appreciated neighborhood friend Louise [the admirable painter Louise Fishman] gets a very high score for spontaneity. Over the past dozen years one or the other of our phones will often ring between 8 and 2. One voice will ask, “Breakfast?” The other will respond (usually), “Sure.” One or the other will lock in the time, “See(…)
My sister Nancy (owner of the sublime, cozy, popular Arbor B & B in High Falls, New York) and I discussed iceberg lettuce this morning in the dark way before dawn as an upstairs smoke alarm made ping-ing sounds every minute or so. Because guests were asleep Nancy restrained herself from rushing upstairs to disarm the alarm. Meanwhile, we recalled(…)
A miracle in my garden. Or so it seems. So much had recently slipped through my fingers (a sudden death in Oslo, a sudden death at a gym on Madison Avenue, my brother’s passing on 17th Street, surgery needed by a very, very significant other) in these past weeks that I just couldn’t let this one(…)
Every year, at this time, our father got very excited because the time was coming to take us out for school supplies. We were four kids and he accompanied each and every one of us irregardless of age, grade or whether or not we wanted his company. Hard to believe, but he’d been looking(…)
Today – September 1, 2016 – there will be an unusual Solar Eclipse when (out of nowhere) the moon’s shadow will overlap the sun, darken the day, until a thin rind of glowing light appears. The rind that illuminates the moon’s edges will then slowly widen until the shadow entirely passes across it, seen no more. An ordinary day will return. Today’s eclipse will last 7 minutes and(…)
Her birth name wasn’t Cass nor Elliott but was Ellen Naomi Cohen from Baltimore whose grandparents, like mine, were Russian immigrants with old-world manners who spoke to us with heavy accents and among themselves in Yiddish. Tormented in childhood because she was overweight, Ellen went from being a plump child to a fat woman who loved men, music, also food. When she died word spread that(…)
A tune crept into my mind (through my ear, perhaps) and hasn’t left me alone since. How to exorcise it? “Catch A Falling Star” Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket Never let it fade away Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket Save it for a rainy dayFor love may come(…)
It just so happens that I’ve arrived in Canada, a place I love and admire, on Canada Day. [O CANADA, National Anthem with Lyrics and photos ] Listen, and get in the mood! What’s Canada Day, I asked at the celebration we stumbled on at the driftwood center on Pender Island, B.C. where we encountered *Mounties, *bagpipe(…)
I left New York at dawn; joined a rush-hour crowd on the E train at my corner; got to JFK; jumped on a 737, aisle seat. Five hours and fourteen minutes later we gently touched down at LAX, Los Angeles International Airport, a madhouse. The temperature was 104 degrees. I watched a smokey fire burning against the robbins-egg blue sky on(…)
