The Google Maps car route from my home in the Bronx to the Gulf of Mexico passes through eight states along thirteen hundred miles of road. Johnson City, Tennessee, the southernmost town along the route that I visited, marks the halfway point. Every state below Johnson City has always struck me… Read full post »

When I moved into my place on 239th Street, some women in the neighborhood told me about a handyman who had good hands. His name Franco Melendez* and he lived with the Koenigs, husband-and-wife furniture restorers who didn’t mind Franco hiring out his services when he had free time. I saw… Read full post »

Border crossings frequently conjure up pictures of bureaucratic 

hassles or fleeing refugees. For writer and translator 

Peter 

Wortsman

Listen to Wortsman… Read full post »

"War fills certain functions essential to the stability of our society; until other ways of filling them are developed, the war system must be maintained -- and improved in effectiveness." 

The author of these words was a 20th-century Jonathan Swift who worked… Read full post »

We denizens of the twenty-first century look back to the 

last century as the time of the great mass murders: the 

Holocaust, the Soviet gulag, the Cultural Revolution, 

Cambodia, Rwanda. 

We forget -- or never knew -- about the murder in the late 

nineteenth a… Read full post »

You’re an ordinary American kid, except little by little, 

you start to understand that something bigger than 

yourself, something terrible, is as much a part of your life as baseball and rock 'n roll.

Listen to Peter Balakian talk about Black Dog of… Read full post »

Phillip Lopate talks about his mother:

"My mother was very theatrical. She was an actress in the  last fifteen or so years of her life. She'd always  wanted to be a performer of some kind. But we were poor and  she was working first in a factory, and then… Read full post »

Who would think that anything good could come from a philandering 

husband?  

Travel and gardening writer Maria Finn wrote a book called Hold me Tight and Tango Me Home about tangoing her way out of heartbreak.

You can listen to her 6-minute/… Read full post »

Thanks to my gig at IBM, I can afford to see concerts again at Carnegie Hall. James Taylor is on the world music roster for 2011 and I was thrilled to get parquet tickets to see him. My sister and I saw Sweet Baby James a long time ago when he and Carole/… Read full post »

You know what my problem is? My problem is I picture being married to every man I meet. If you are a man and we have met somewhere — in school, at a party, on the job — I have wondered what our lives would be like together.

The problem is, I… Read full post »

Every so often I go into a grand funk. Why now when I am working again and not two months ago when I expected to stay unemployed indefinitely? I can only say, with no small amount of embarrassment, that I can dive down into a well of sadness so wide that… Read full post »

Two years into my life as a single mother, I began seeing a therapist named Gertrude Falak.* Her office was on Central Park West and 86th Street, and street parking being what it is in Manhattan, I took an express bus from the Bronx to make my Wednesday 11:00 a.m. appointment… Read full post »

You would not believe the amount of shlepping it takes to shoot a short documentary. I’ve been renting lights, camera and a boom mike from a rental shop on 45th and Ninth, and the haulage involved in transporting the equipment to the film location in south Jersey is almost enough to m… Read full post »

If Stewart Kaisen* were alive, I would have found him by now. He’s not on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, the twenty-first-century precincts for a networker and a lover of social fads. Back in the twentieth century, Stewart couldn’t slip under the radar if he tried. He had friends from hig… Read full post »

As a literate individual, I like to think that I excel at playing Scrabble. I’m better than average, but I rarely best my three biggest challengers: My sister Pesha, who was valedictorian of her high school class; my niece, who has a PhD in community gardening; and my niece’s husband, a… Read full post »

Comes a time in the life of every New York City woman when she thinks about learning Spanish. Some women enroll in a class for practical reasons: They want to understand their students or patients. A lot of us, though, feel the gravitational pull in our solar plexus toward a culture… Read full post »

Purim always gets me thinking about going naked.

This carnival holiday begins with the story of a feast in the garden of King Xerxes, or Ahasuerus, as he is known in the Book of Esther. The drunken binge, circa 483 B.C.E.,  takes place in the “third year of his reign for all/… Read full post »

I was twenty-four when I took the elevator up to the eighth floor at 17 West 17th Street to begin my career as a writer for Liberation News Service. The building was near Union Square and the latino y criollas restaurants where I used to drink cafe con leche after a day of writing… Read full post »

Bad dates aren’t worth getting all het up about. They are no worse than standing on line forever at the post office to return a too-tight Victoria’s Secret tankini or filling out six healthcare forms in one day with the same @#%& information about your family medical history and age a… Read full post »