We left Rome yesterday morning, driven to the airport by a large, gregarious taxi driver who had grown up for a while in the US. His English was excellent, and his accent, though still Puccini-like, carried a bit of New Jersey gruffness. As if he had a Teamsters card tucked…

I took myself out to a favorite autumn spot. The sky was gray, the air cool. Sounds: magpie, Tonwsand Solitare, tree frogs, the swish and rustle of dry grass and leaves, the rush of water from a clear running creek. The scent: sharp with juniper and sage, one heavy with…

My thoughts on today’s news: NUMBER 1 I don’t want to hear about that air sucking ass-hat named Donald Trump. I don’t give two craps about him and his prime time indictment. There is nothing surprising or earthshaking about a conman getting his comeuppance, and there is nothing more pitiful…

On seeing beyond history Naseem Rakha I am in Germany for the first time in my life. This is the place my mother’s parents were from. They immigrated in the 1920’s. They were tailors, and lived for a time above their shop, The House of Fine Slacks, in Chicago. I…

I woke up the morning of July 4th feeling cynical about “Independence Day” after the recent slew of Supreme Court decisions that essentially eviscerated long-standing constitutional rights and protections considered core to our democracy. With Dobbs v. Jackson, the Supreme Court’s newly anointed conservative supermajority stripped women of the constitutional…

Anyone who’s read George Orwell’s “1984,” the dystopian novel about life under an authoritarian regime, knows that to survive, one had to accept whatever Big Brother said no matter how big the lie. Proof you’d come to fully embrace the all-controlling Party was to believe without question that two plus…

In Hiding IN HIDING Altitude 2134 feet. Sky clear. Vine maple leaves, red and gold, scatter in the breeze. Moss-covered ground is as soft and wet as a kitchen sponge, and I know this because I am lying on that ground. Flattened to it. There is a rutted, gravel road…

Seasonal Gifts In winter I find myself thinking about how much I love winter. It is its quiet, its long nights, its holiday traditions, one after another, trees and candles and music and light. It is its storms shaking boughs and filling rivers and covering mountains in white. …

-Naseem Rakha After riding a bus for nine hours from his college, Elijah came home for a brief 26 hour visit, just enough time for Chuck and him to go out for breakfast then spend the day with our dying cat, Itty Bitty. …