“Roshi’s Laundromat Blues,” the last short story I wrote in the spring of 1980, had a simple premise. What if you were at a laundromat, waiting for your clothes to finish the wash cycle, when you heard that John F. Kennedy had been shot and was dead? The idea was at this emotional moment, Roshi, […]

Sometime in the mid-1960s, my mother and I drove over the then-new Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which opened on November 21, 1964. As we crossed over “the Narrows,” which separate Brooklyn from Staten Island, I vaguely recall my mother telling me that the crossing was the world’s longest suspension bridge, which impressed me. And as we descended

Around the time she turned 60, writer Nina Shengold decided to walk the path around New York’s Ashokan Reservoir every day for a year. Last spring, she published “Reservoir Year,” an edited account of the journals she wrote after each walk. I heard about the book this summer when, thanks to Facebook, I reconnected with

“Everyone,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously s said, “is entitled to his own opinion.” “But, he added, “they are not entitled to their own facts.” Moynihan’s words are particularly appropriate in the current fraught moment when, in my opinion, the current President of the United States and his supporters refuse to acknowledge basic facts about the

In the spring of 1944, General George S. Patton, gave a series of profanity-filled, inspirational speeches to soldiers in the newly formed US Third Army, was preparing to be part of the Allied invasion of France. “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country,” he famously said. “He won it by making

In my 50s, I started playing goalie in the wonderfully named “Over-the-Hill Soccer League,” Over the years, I relearned some important lessons not only about sports but also about life. Those timely lessons are underscored by today’s #stampoftheday, a 4-cent stamp, issued on November 6, 1961, the 100th birthday of James Naismith, who invented the

Officially, I voted for the first time, in 1976. Unofficially, I had been voting for years. My mother used to bring me with her when she voted in the gymnasium at the Lincoln Elementary School in Summit, where I grew up. I have vivid memories of the mechanical voting machines and the curtains that surrounded

Very few stamps were issued during first years of World War II and most that were issued related directly to the war and the war effort. But one of the handful that were issued was today’s #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp issued on October 31, 1944 honoring the 50th anniversary of motion pictures. (The event commemorated

In August 21, 1945, my father, along with almost 15,000 other soldiers, was on the Queen Mary, which was one of the first ships to bring soldiers back from Europe at the end of World War II. As the ship approached New York Harbor, the soldiers saw a familiar and welcome sight—the Statue of Liberty.

Although my parents always voted (almost always, I think, for Democrats), they weren’t political. They didn’t work on campaigns, go to rallies or become involved in the civil rights or anti-war movements. And, with one exception, I never heard them speak highly of any national politician. The exception was Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic nominee for