I recently had the opportunity to sit with the President in the Oval Office for a conversation about matters past and present. The transcript that follows has been edited for brevity and clarity. Editing it for sanity would have been too much of a stretch. In the transcript, I’m identified as YT (yours truly), and […]

When I was a kid, living in Meriden, CT, my next-door neighbor, Gary, was six or eight years older than me. On summer nights, after I’d gone to bed, Gary would sit outside, just below my bedroom window, listening to baseball games on a little transistor radio. He loved to listen to Bob Prince call […]

Author’s note: While what follows appears in my column, under my byline, I didn’t write it. It was written by my older sister, Lynn. Lynn would tell you she’s not a writer. She’d be wrong. This is the eulogy she delivered at our mother’s funeral on January 26th. I would not have been able to […]

We live on East Street in Middletown, Connecticut. On the west side of East Street, there’s a neighborhood, Sylvan Run Village, in which Eddie loves to walk every morning. Through that neighborhood, there’s a stream that flows north. Since I don’t believe in gravity, I don’t find that particularly troubling. But I did want to […]

In the United States, we’ll celebrate Thanksgiving on Thursday of this week. Like all other things in the United States, Thanksgiving, too, has become subject to politicization and myth-making. According to Britannica: Thanksgiving is modeled on a 1621 harvest feast shared by the English colonists (Pilgrims) of Plymouth and the Wampanoag people … Plymouth’s Thanksgiving […]

Kindness is the language that the deaf can hear and the blind can see. ~ Unknown Many people appreciate that being kind is synonymous with showing you care about others.  On the other hand, others sneer at kindness in business and express the belief that if you’re too kind, you only set yourself up for […]

I’ve written about my depression before. But since this is Mental Health Awareness Month — and since every month should be Mental Health Awareness Month — I want to revisit the topic. In that earlier piece, I wrote my depression was characterized by stark, unrelenting terror. It resulted in a kind of hypervigilance, an exaggerated […]

As the obsessive language freak I happen to be, I’m always sensitive to new expressions creeping into the vernacular. Most frequently, those expressions are meaningless; that is, they don’t actually express anything of substance. But they’re valuable for what they signal. And they signal four things about the people who use them. Those people: Likely […]

I was sitting at my desk the other day with a characteristically blank look on my face. Anne walked by and asked, “What are you doing?” I said, “Nothing.” “You’re actually doing absolutely nothing?” she asked. “Is that even possible?” “Well, since you seem to be rather insistent about it, I’m drifting,” I said. “Drifting?” […]

When I visit schools to share my children’s books, the students always ask, “How do you know anyone will like them?” I say, “I don’t. But if I don’t write and publish them, I’ll never know.” When I write fiction for adults, the adults who read it always ask, “How do you know anyone will […]