For me, and many other people, today is the one-year anniversary of when I not only started working from home but also began to actively avoid as many face-to-face interactions as possible. Reflecting on this anniversary this evening, I’ve been thinking about what I’ve needed to get through the year. That, in turn, made me […]

As the great gospel song says, I “woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom.” I didn’t realize that was the case until late in the day but looking back at the day, it’s clear it was there all day long. Freedom was a clear theme when, over my morning coffee, I read

“In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost,” is one of many lines that Dante Alighieri wrote in the 14th century that seem totally appropriate for March 2021. It’s appropriate for me today, because I spent the day on Zoom doing

Before there were Google Maps, before there was MapQuest, there was something my daughters called “GrannieQuest.” GrannieQuest was a remarkable, personalized navigation service. If you were driving somewhere, you would call my mother and ask for directions. You would quickly get accurate, detailed directions (told from memory) even if it had been years since my

Is there anything interesting to say about a stamp honoring the 150th anniversary of Ohio becoming a state and a stamp honoring the 100th anniversary of when the Washington Territory was created? That’s the question I’ve been pondering this evening as I’ve been getting ready to write about the two stamps, which, since they were

“Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat,” was the opening line of “ABC’s Wide World of Sports, which illustrated the agony with ski jumper falling off the side of the ski jump hill. I watched the show regularly in the late 60s

In 1949, my father received a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Cooper Union. Seventy years later, we found his lab reports and tests in the boxes of papers, photos, and ephemera that we had put in storage in 2013. To be clear: this meant that my parents had taken those papers with them on

My childhood was filled with people who served in the Merchant Marine. I didn’t have any relatives who had served (that I know of). And while I’m sure that some of the adults I knew had served as mariners, I didn’t know about it. But others, who were important to me did serve. Popeye, for

Like many people in the “before time,” I had my share of difficult airplane trips. I waited for hours in Reagan National Airport one June Friday when summer thunderstorms delayed all the flights to Boston. I once spent the better part of frustrating snowy winter day at Logan Airport trying, unsuccessfully, to get to a

John Glenn, the first American (and third person) to orbit the earth, wasn’t my favorite astronaut in the mid 1960s. That honor belonged to the lesser known Wally Schirra, who was the fifth American and ninth person to orbit the earth. And that’s why the gerbil I accidentally killed was named Wally, not John. Glenn