We all understand that while the Christmas tradition of gift-giving is most closely linked to the legend of Santa Claus, the origin of the story dates back to St. Nicholas of Myra, a Christian bishop in Myra (modern-day Turkey). A few years ago, on our motorcycle trip through Turkey, we actually stopped in Myra and stood beneath his statue, so I can say I’ve been to the real North Pole. St. Nicholas was known for…
My experience with sushi dates back to 1976 on my first day of work in the New York City banking world. I don’t think I had ever really even heard of sushi before then. I started work at Bankers Trust Company on Monday, June 28, 1976. I had secured a spot as a Cornell MBA graduate in their bank training program and was being paid the princely sum of $17,000 per year. That had afforded…
There is something about these years when Christmas and New Years fall in the middle of the week (this year it was Thursday) that make the holidays feel like they are somewhat extended. I don’t want to sound like the Grinch, but they seem to be dragging on. Truth be told, our relatives (other than son Tom) left quite briskly on the 26th and Tom did his usual departure on New Years Eve, all of…
For the second day in a row, I find myself sittting here in the living room of our hilltop with the sun shining brightly on a crisp December morning and the air being so clear that the Pacific Ocean feels to be right at our feet to the west. Just over the rolling hills of Vista that sit between our hilltop and the coast, we can see a full 40 miles of deep blue ocean.…
Stephen King is one of the best-selling authors in history with over 400 million books sold. Nearly every major work has been adapted for film or TV. He’s achieved sustained success across five decades, which is extraordinarily rare. For decades, critics dismissed him as a “genre writer” producing commercial horror rather than “serious literature.” But that is changing and he has won the National Book Foundation’s Medal (2003), won Bram Stoker Awards, World Fantasy Awards,…
We are changing it up this holiday season every which way. We started by taking our trip to London, Edinburgh and Prague over the Thanksgiving holiday. And while we kept to form with our NYC Cornell Club family gathering and will have the whole local family over on Christmas Day, we usually have done a New Years Party for the neighbors, but have chosen to substitute that with a neighbors’ holiday gathering here next Saturday.…
One of the things that I carry with me from my 40+ years of living in metropolitan NYC is my love for bagels. I had had bagels during college since Cornell is basically an outpost of NYC in some ways, and the biggest bakery/eatery/hang-out spot in Ithaca is called Collegetown Bagels. But it was my lime living in NYC and Long Island that made me love bagels. My favorite bagel is an Everything Bagel, which…
As most people who read this blog know, I am traveling in Europe at the moment, heading back to New York City tomorrow to spend a few days with the family in Midtown Manhattan to celebrate the holidays and then head back to our hilltop to dig in for the full holiday season. I have written often about the angst we have about traveling as the years pass by. I get regularly chided by friends…
I have a long and involved affiliation with Venezuela. In 1946, my mother, at the age of thirty, “joined the Foreign Legion” by hiring on to the Rockefeller Foundation to go to Venezuela to do rural indigenous development work. She was literally choosing to escape a turbulent five years on both the global and personal fronts and trade in her decade of work with the New York State Welfare Department for a new adventure. After…
Back in the 1800s on some obscure cricket field, when a bowler achieved the rare feat of taking three wickets with three consecutive deliveries, he was traditionally awarded a new hat from his club, or allowed to pass around his hat to collect money from spectators. Then in hockey (among other sports), the term became a big celebratory moment… literal hats rain down onto the ice from the crowd when a player scores three goals…