According to MIT Professor Richard Larsen who studies such things, Americans spend roughly 37 billion hours a year waiting. Yes, I said “waiting.” A 2022 consumer survey, “The State of Waiting In Line” (on waitwhile.com) identified waiting in retail check-out lines as the most common… Read More
The first notice came in our community newsletter enclosed with the monthly water bill. The local contract for waste removal was expiring and had to be renegotiated. Of course garbage fees would be going up (isn’t everything?), but residents had choices that could… Read More
My husband and I just spent a few days in New Orleans. The City is special for us because we first met there, later honeymooned there, and have returned many, many times over the years to celebrate our wedding anniversary in July. Yes, we usually… Read More
If you’re a fan of night-time television dramas, you might recall a series on ABC named Revenge. Vaguely inspired by a famous nineteenth-century novel by Alexander Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo ,1844), the series premiered in 2011 and ran successfully for four seasons. As… Read More
Anyone who writes or crafts speeches or otherwise wrestles with words knows that all synonyms are not created equal. Dip into almost any thesaurus and you will find numerous entries for words that mean the same, or nearly the same, as the one you are… Read More
We are getting ready to go away — away, away — really away, overseas and into another hemisphere. Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while might remember that in 2020 we were about to embark on a trip to Australia… Read More
In the Christian tradition, both Eastern Orthodox and Western, January 6 is celebrated as the Epiphany, or Feast of the Three Kings. The word “epiphany” comes from the Greek word “epipháneia” meaning the appearance or manifestation of the real — in the Biblical sense, the… Read More
A recent Sunday New York Times featured full-page photo spreads of people reading all around the City: old people, young people, children; walking, sitting, lying down; on the subway, in a park, on a front stoop… What is it about the summer, exactly, that prompts… Read More
People who don’t know me well would immediately describe me as outgoing, gregarious, animated, even loud. In other words, I appear to exhibit traits that are in direct contrast to the quiet, serious, studious demeanor that we generally ascribe to people we consider “bookish.” But… Read More
The school year is over, the sun is shining, people are out and about (inflation and gas prices be damned) and, in spite of bad news about almost everything every single day, there is a celebratory spirit in the air. I can’t seem to get… Read More
the narrative thread 