Losing Friends I may have mentioned along the way that I have moved primary residence twenty-three times in my life. That averages to a tad more than two years in a residence. While that average appropriately characterizes my high level of movement over my life, the three longest stays in one place were nine years in the South Street Seaport (where I met Kim), seven years on Canterbury Road in Rockville Centre (where my two…
Becoming Emodiverse OK, I presume you are like me and had never heard the term emodiverse. We all understand how important diversity is, right? Well, its not just culture and ecology that require diversity. Our emotions apparently also need a degree of diversity to be the healthiest they can be. The simplest way to think about this is that we need some bad times to fully appreciate the good times. The same is true of…
Letting the Sun Shine Kim and I sit on the sofa most nights while the afternoon turns to evening, listening to the day’s news and wondering about the state of the world. The current debate playing out on the national stage seems to be focused on whether government is an instrument of good or bad. Are we in 1930 and in need of the helping hand of FDR, or are we in 1980 when Reagan…
Mater Gladiatrix Today is International Women’s Day and I am inclined to write a story about the two most meaningful women that have shaped my life. They are my mother, Dr. Ludmilla Ann Uher Prosdocimi Marin Jenkins and Kimberly Ann Grogg Marin. I use all of their names because women have the mostly unique experience of living with the historical convention of assuming the surname of their husbands. This gives rise to many machinations and…
History for History’s Sake We were just visited by my nephew Jason. Jason is my sister Barbara’s oldest child and he is now over forty years old though he always seems younger to me. Jason did not go to college where his younger sister attended Cornell University as an undergraduate and went on to get her veterinary degree at Kansas State. Jason has supported himself by being a specialized garage door guy who apprenticed with…
Buck Naked The human form has inspired many artists and writers over the millennia, and yet, humans are the only species that have found it necessary to work hard to drape that form with coverings and clothing. From our perusal of the pages of National Geographic when we were young and rooting around in the basement, we learned that primitive man seemed less inclined to cover the human form as much as we in civilized…
COVID-Free At Last Last Saturday I had my second dose of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine and after only about an hour’s worth of chills and slightly elevated temperature, I have been fit as a fiddle. The event of the vaccination, which I did in the idyllic burg of La Jolla was really a non-event. I parked in a nice parking structure, walked on serene pathways following big COVID Vaccination signs to a large and airy building…
The Totems of My Life I am not certain why or how it has happened, but I am surrounded by totems. They mean everything and yet they mean nothing at all. Just this week, Kim gave me a birthday/anniversary/Valentines gift she had had made for me by her favorite gift store in New York, named Domus on West 44th Street in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen. In Ancient Rome, a domus was a distinguished house…
Lunch With Ralph A few months ago I wrote about finding out I had a new half-sister. From that encounter (we have been in touch several times via text), one of my other half-sisters found a long lost half-brother in the online world. His name is Ralph and he is two years younger than me. It seems our father spread his seed far and wide across California, Mexico and perhaps even in Venezuela, where he…
Turning the Corner The deck, the deck, my kingdom for a deck. It has been eleven weeks since the work started on this damnable deck renovation. I had originally estimated (I thought conservatively) that it would take eight weeks. It now looks like I will be lucky if it is finished in thirteen weeks. That is a full quarter of a year, in this case the months of December, January and February. That’s a long…