My Muse is not non-binary
I know this to be true
A categorical female she
A woman through and through
Don’t ask which pronouns are preferred
She’ll tell you she and her
Inquire about fluidity
And she will not demur
With head thrown back defiantly
To let her mane unfurl
She’ll…
When I was a senior in high school, an English teacher introduced the class to a poem that immediately took up permanent residence in my head: “For Once, Then, Something,” by Robert Frost.
It goes like this:
Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light…
Sometimes I can’t help but see you
As that precocious, precious little girl,
With her hair all piled up on her head,
Topped off with that audacious curl.
“I’m here! It’s me!” you seem to say,
Without so much as a single word.
“I’m smart, I’m strong, with a mind of…
Shortly after moving from our chicken farm in central New Jersey to the teeming Philadelphia suburb of Levittown, Pa., there was a knock on our screen door. It was the kid from across the street — said his name was Phil — asking if I wanted to come outside and…
On Oct.1, the company where I spent 35 years of my life — the Swiss healthcare group Roche — celebrates its 125th anniversary. That means I experienced more than a quarter of the company’s history first-hand. But Roche has me beat. It occupied a full 50% of my nearly 70-year…
“John, we love you!”
A woman behind my wife and me in the massive security check-in queue at JFK was shouting to man being escorted with his wife, VIP-style, to the front of the line. As we were trying to figure out who they were, the couple turned their masked…
When I asked my mom, who was 92 and in the middle rounds of her fight with Alzheimer’s, what was up with the densely packed pink toiletry bag sitting on her couch, she shrugged her shoulders. So I sat down to take a look inside. …
My shrink is an ardent proponent of the school of psychology that attributes the ways we adapt to life to the influences our parents had on us as children. Because my father was anxious, depressed and suicidal, my therapist says, I suffered the double whammy of inheriting some of my…
I was filling out a Medium survey the other day when I came to a question asking if “my best writing is a product of diligent, relentless effort,” or if it’s “a product of being at ease, in a state of flow?”
The fact is, some of my best stories…
The doctor at the assisted living facility where I’d just checked in my 87-year-old mother must have been out sick the day his medical school taught their class in bedside manner. “You have Alzheimer’s disease,” he told my mom, with an abrasive chill in his voice and a stern and…
