Awkward cultural situations in Colombia, solved
GIRARDOT, Colombia — On Christmas Day, as I lounged poolside in this hot tropical town, sweating and reading Tom Clancy’s Hunt for Red October, an email popped up in my iPhone. It was the foreign...
View ArticleA conversation with my main character
In my last post, I talked about how tense I felt about my book tour this spring. I half-jokingly mentioned I’d love to hire my main character to impersonate me. A more confident, smoother version of...
View ArticleHoney, I changed the locks
(Ruminator’s note: Part of an occasional series, this essay is a factual retelling of events depicted in my upcoming novel) Of everything that’s happened to me in life, perhaps nothing upset my moral...
View ArticleFour decades later, finding what I lost on Long Island
I’m not exactly sure when I forgave my parents for moving to East Meadow, Long Island. The year was 1971; antiwar protests raged across America, but all I knew, at the age of nine, was I missed my...
View ArticleWhen Brooklyn was Egypt, and Long Island was Canaan
When thousands of Brooklynites, including my parents, fled en masse to Long Island in the 1960s and ‘70s, I had no clue we were reinventing the Exodus. But there we were, Jews running away from...
View ArticleOn the occasion of our daughter’s Bat Mitzvah
Most of the time, my life is quite ordinary. I type into my computer and rearrange words. Chauffeur my daughter around. Bake chicken. Fish into my pockets for exact change when I’m buying a medium...
View ArticleBook Tour on the Brain
After three months, six pens, thousands of invitations, and nearly a dozen stops – stretching from Saratoga and Boston in the north, to Brooklyn and Long Island in the south — I’ve contracted a...
View ArticleWriting my way out of this pickle I’m in
Ruminator’s note: Sometimes how a book is written is in itself a story that bears retelling. One such story is the one that resulted in my novel. The journey that led to my novel, released this spring,...
View ArticleFast Love in the Alhambra: Part 1
Ruminator’s note: This is part one of my short story about an impossible romance in an ancient part of Spain Early afternoon in Granada, and the air was electric with romance. American men and women...
View ArticleLessons I’ve learned from my dogs
I know the name of every dog I ever owned. I’ve heard their barks in my dreams. I’ve learned more lessons from them than I did from my college professors. My first dog was Rusty, a beagle. When I was...
View ArticleTaking refuge in the past, and the present
There are places in my past I return to when the present feels like too much to handle. I walk its beaches in my mind, hear the surf massage the shore, smell the sandy heat, gaze out into darkness at...
View ArticleLessons I’ve learned from my hamsters
(Ruminator’s Note: This is an updated version of an essay I posted about a year ago. I changed words, and photos, here and there. Can you figure out what’s different—and which previous post it’s based...
View ArticleMy imagined contract with cockroaches
When I can’t write, I think of a word. Anything. I seek connections between seemingly unrelated events. I try to have faith. I reassure myself that it takes a while to get used to the darkness. I...
View ArticleMy coming of age as a hoarder
One chilly evening in February 2000, I came home from work and noticed a variety of shirts and pants draped over the metal fence in front of my apartment building. Some kind soul evidently had left out...
View ArticleFast Love in the Alhambra, Part 1
Ruminator’s note: This is part one of my short story about an impossible romance in an ancient part of Spain Early afternoon in Granada, and the air was electric with romance. Men and women on blind...
View ArticleFast Love in the Alhambra, Part 3
Ruminator’s note: Part three of my short story about forbidden romance in Spain. In part one (click here), Alice and Ed—10 years after divorce—accidentally meet through a dating service specializing in...
View ArticleA made-up conversation with my daughter
We were born under similar circumstances, you and I. Here’s what kicked things off, in both our cases: a growth. A couple of cells. They were hellbent on dividing. My story, the part most relevant to...
View ArticleA rare coming together of Hanukah and Christmas
On Saturday night, nine Catholics and three-and-a-half Jews – including me — will gather around our Christmas tree, also known as a Hanukah bush, unwrap presents, light the menorah, and recite two sets...
View ArticleA cynic’s search for greener pastures yields a hopeful sign
When my family and I moved upstate from Brooklyn fifteen years ago, our new hometown — Clifton Park — seemed like the country to me. Houses were spaced out on large wooded lots. Forests and farm fields...
View ArticleIn twilight of life, a centenarian finds her cause célèbre
Fran Shapiro was born in 1913, a year before World War I. Before radio stations. Three years before America’s first birth control clinic opened. The century “went by so fast, I have no idea where it...
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