It was in the summer of 1952 that I found myself sitting in the police station of the 13th Precinct in Manhattan. My family lived in an area of the city that was close to Greenwich Village, not far from Bellevue Hospital where my father worked as a physician. At the time I was with the police, I was going on four and a half and my sister was five months old. She was born in March of that year on the day after St. Patrick’s Day. The story has it that my mother’s water broke while we were at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Fifth Avenue. My grandmother was with us, and I am told that my mother took a cab to Lenox Hill Hospital about a half a mile away while my grandmother and I stayed to watch all the people dressed in green.
Read MoreIt’s a curiosity to me that I love to write while I’m on an airplane. Since I don’t like flying much, it’s odd that I am so comfortable writing at 30,000 feet in the air. It’s the in-betweenness I like, the liminal quality of being neither here nor there. It’s like traveling through ambiguity.
Read MoreI set the alarm last night, since I missed my last appointment. She charged me for it, which is a fucked-up way to make money if you ask me. I just overslept, for God’s sake. Whatever. I do my goddamn best. I told her I needed to get my kitchen sink fixed. I lied when I said it had been broken for a month. It’s been over a year that I’ve been washing the dishes in the bathtub. Who the hell cares? Should I tell her I called the plumber just to make her think we’re making progress?
Read MoreIn college, I majored in art history — not thinking beyond the fact that I liked to look at beautiful pictures, beautiful anything, really. I suppose I could tie this to my growing up only a few blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art — but that would be giving my choice in majors too lofty an explanation. No, I liked looking at slides projected onto a huge screen in the classroom or lecture hall. I never gave a thought to what I would do with art history after college, never had a yearning to work in a museum, a hankering to be an archivist or a curator. I simply liked to look at art.
Read MoreMy mother loved Adlai Stevenson. She was a member of the League of Women Voters and she worked tirelessly to help him defeat Dwight D. Eisenhower in the presidential elections of 1952 and 1956. My mother hated Eisenhower and Nixon, and when they won both times, I remember her crying as she watched the election results on our black-and-white television set.
Read MoreI have had a cartoon looping inside my head for the past week: the tops of all the houses have been severed, sliced off — and, like a human drone, I am able to see inside each one. It is, I suppose, a fantasy revealing an overabundance of curiosity. But then again, I am a therapist, endlessly fascinated by the stories of people’s lives. Perhaps this proclivity toward observation (bordering on prying) developed while growing up in New York, where I watched people, so many people, day in and day out from the windows of our apartment overlooking 82nd Street in Manhattan.
Read MoreWalking between rows of sparkling luxury vehicles in the used-car lot at a local Lexus dealer, I exclaim to my son: “If each of these cars were a person, we would be standing in a crowd of white privileged people who are country club members, preoccupied with all things comfortable, running late to meet their friends at the golf course.”
Read MoreI am not a lover of commercial holidays. Yet, because I live in this country, I am subject to the undertow of advertising and groupthink. So when Mother’s Day comes around, always about a week after my birthday (which, for me, is a personal, noncommercial holiday), I am reminded of how much of a lemming I have become.
Read MoreWhen a word or a phrase is overused — and I mean used so often it breaks free from the dictionary, infiltrating the water supply, air filtration systems, telecommunication networks — I feel queasy and, sadly, judgmental.
Read MoreWhen I speak about my mother, I call her Ruth. My husband, Jonathan, calls her by her first name too, as does my brother, David. She is a formidable woman, accomplished, intellectually arrogant and articulate. If she hears anyone use a word or a phrase incorrectly, she does not hesitate to bring them into line. She even corrected the man who officiated the memorial service of my father.
Read MoreThe first waiting room I remember is that of Dr. Stanley Kent, my childhood dentist. His office was in Midtown Manhattan, near Rockefeller Center. The waiting room was at one end of a suite of rooms, including a receptionist’s room, two examining rooms with huge throne-like mechanical chairs for the patients, and a dental lab where someone named Leo made plaster casts of peoples’ mouths. Dr. Kent had his own office at the far end and the door was always closed.
Read MoreI am not a world traveler in the National Geographic sense of the word. I have been to several countries in Europe, but I have not been anywhere in Asia, Africa or South America. When my friends talk about their trips, I am always interested, but rarely envious. I have wondered throughout my life why this is. I certainly love to learn new things, and I have been told I am annoyingly curious. So you would think I would crave getting away and exploring new cultures and customs; in fact, when I have gone to new places, I have had wonderful experiences. It’s just that I don’t yearn to travel, to pack my bag and venture very far.
Read MoreLong ago, I had my astrological chart read. I was born on May 4, 1948, at 10:14 a.m. in New York City. I supplied the astrologer with that information and when I met with her, the first thing she said, her eyes open as wide as they could go, was: Do you ever leave the house? What led her to ask me this question was the fact I have Taurus in some outrageous number of the twelve zodiac houses. I don’t really know what this means, but I had to answer her question honestly: Not if I don’t have to.
Read MoreI was in the seventh grade when I fell deeply in love for the first time. Her name was Mrs. Fletcher and she was my science teacher. This was no small crush; I was really in love — losing sleep, my appetite, thinking about her all the time. She had graduated from Smith College several years before taking a teaching position at the small girls’ school in Manhattan I attended. She was newly married to her husband, Carl Fletcher, who was in his medical residency at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. My own mother had gone to Smith and my father was a physician; these similarities were not lost on me, even at the age of 13.
Read MoreIt’s true. I took psychedelic drugs in the 1960s and 70s. The Vietnam War was raging while I was a student at a liberal and politically active college in Oberlin, Ohio. I was 19, disillusioned with the status quo, disappointed with the way my parents and their friends lived. I did not like drinking, and even smoking marijuana was something I did not do often, though the opportunity was around all the time. But when I heard a friend talk about his experience with psychedelics, I was intrigued. It sounded like a fascinating experience, one that was not about hanging out or partying. The phrase used all the time was mind- expanding. I had heard it could be transformative, visually beautiful, life-changing. I also heard about the bad trips some people were experiencing: paranoia, agitation, despair. But I was young, and taking a risk seemed worth it for the possibility of smelling sound, hearing color and coming upon a new cosmic order.
Read MoreI once had my astrological chart read. Before we met, I told the astrologer the date, place and time I was born, and the first thing she said when I saw her was, Do you ever leave home? I said, Not much. Evidently my sun sign (Taurus) is in the majority of my 12 houses; I don’t know what that means actually, but I gathered it was significant by the look on her face. Now, I did not need a reading to know that I prefer home more than any other place on earth, though it was confirming to know it was indicated emphatically in the celestial bodies of the universe. What has been true much of my older adult life is that I rarely travel very far from home.
Read MoreNot everyone has lived in a refurbished chicken coop. And I mean a real chicken coop, not a small house the size of a chicken coop. I lived in such a structure near Iowa City, Iowa. It had three rooms and the tiniest bathroom imaginable.
Read MoreThere is a kind of hot and humid summer air on the Eastern Seaboard, mixed with salt coming off the Atlantic, which is like no other. There should be a word for it, a separate descriptor, but if there is, I’ve not heard it. Sticky and thick, it coats the body with an invisible layer of saline sap, and hair takes on the quality of seaweed, stringy and fibrous. I imagine these days are like those in many tropical climates, but in Southampton, New York, there is money and arrogance mixed into the salty atmosphere, making these sultry, stifling days almost unbearable.
Read MoreIn New York City, there are millions of people to whom Easter Sunday is meaningless. We were two of those people. We were 14-year-old Jewish ninth-graders. Easter was the holiday, the day after which you could buy jelly beans and chocolate eggs and bunnies for half price. In 1963, the Good Friday/Easter weekend was warm and sunny. People emerged from apartments like wasps whose nests had been torched. The winter exited suddenly, as if on cue.
Read More1968. The height of the Vietnam War. Campuses were exploding with anti-war fervor. Everywhere, there were protesters. Tear gas and the smell of burning draft cards were in the air. Opposition to the war was both moral and political. In 1964, in the Gulf of Tonkin, North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked two United States destroyers, and in retaliation, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the bombing of military targets in North Vietnam. By late 1967, a half million Americans were fighting in Vietnam, over 15,000 soldiers had been killed and 110,000 had been injured.
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