I have stopped saying that we plan to travel less. The thought was genuine, but unrealistic. Unless Mother Nature, Father Time or Fiscal Fear overwhelm you, if you have been a traveler your whole life, it’s not sensible to think you can just throttle back as a normal lifestyle adjustment. I look around our neighborhood for comparables and find that Mike & Melisa (more homebodies than most) have just returned from their African safari, the…
By this time, everyone knows that the suspected blue wave has been a blue tsunami and all I can say is, THANK GOD! After a decade of losing our minds, losing our infrastructure, losing our most sacred institutions, losing our healthcare, losing our civility, losing our sense of propriety, losing our democratic process, losing many of our legal norms, losing our caring for the human race, losing our global respect and basically losing our way,…
Six years ago I wrote a story called The Morning After. No, it was not about The Poseidon Adventure, that kitschy movie when Red Buttons and Shelly Winters helping Gene Hackman redeem himself in an upside-down cruise ship. When I started to write this story with that title, my early warning system told me I had already used that title. It was a story about the loss of Kim’s soulmate pup, Cecil, who died during…
It’s Election Day today. As I’ve mentioned before, for sixty years I didn’t give a shit about politics. I was a ware of the political landscape and I had my views, but I simply had no time for it all, as life was keeping me busy enough and politics seemed like a game and one big distraction. I got called out for this apathetic view as a freshman in college when the bearded radical on…
Over the years, I’ve had a few encounters with pickpockets. My first one was in Rome at the Porta Portese Flea Market. Porta Portese is a 17th-century city gate on the edge of Trastevere in Rome. It’s best known for the huge Sunday flea market that runs from the gate along Via Portuense and the nearby streets. If you go early, by 7 or 8 a.m., you get the best finds and the thinnest crowds.…
The other day, we were sitting in the Delta Sky Club Lounge at JFK, the least exclusive club in the world where you almost have to try not to gain admission since everyone else seems to get in, when I realized that a first class domestic ticket doesn’t get you into the joint or any other Delta lounge at JFK. How did that happen? I’m not a fan of airline lounges anyway. They are always…
The Bermuda Triangle is a loosely defined patch of the western North Atlantic, roughly bounded by Miami, Bermuda, and San Juan, Puerto Rico, that became famous for supposedly unexplained disappearances of ships and planes. The legend came from a series of events starting with Flight 19, five Navy Avenger bombers lost on a training flight in December 1945, plus the rescue plane sent after them. Before that, the USS Cyclops, a Navy collier, vanished there…
The modern shopping mall dates to 1956, when Southdale Center opened in Edina, Minnesota. Architect Victor Gruen designed it as the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled mall, with two department stores anchoring each end and a central garden court. That became the template for American malls, but it had several earlier precursors dating back to ancient times. There’s a fine line as to what constitutes as mall versus a market. My travels to the Middle East…
I was a banker. To most people these days that means you were a stuff and somewhat money-grubbing sort of traditional office geek. In ancient days the profession of moneylender was a far less savory profession. They were the shylocks. “Shylock” is slang for a loan shark: someone who lends money at extortionate interest and often enforces repayment with threats or violence. As a verb, “to shylock” means to lend at usurious rates. The term…
When I was growing up in Wisconsin between the ages of 7 and 12, I was pretty much on my own. My mother was in graduate school at the university of Wisconsin. She went in at the age of 45 with three kids in tow and no husband or alimony. Mom was a pretty independent woman, having gone off in 1946 to Venezuela with the Rockefeller Foundation, when women did not do those kind of…