Today is Leap Day. We add this extra day in February if the year is evenly divisible by four. That’s once every four years. Right?
Wrong.
Hidden behind a fishing boat, a strange craft is silently lowered into the water. The inventor, David Bushnell, has named it “Turtle” because of its shape…and because it is a submarine. It carries a single bomb and its mission is sabotage.
A thin young man named Ezra Lee hands Bushnell a final letter for … Continue Reading »
In the summer of 2002, Ann and I were in Sevilla, walking back to our lodging after a typically late dinner. It was midnight, but the twisty, cobbled lanes were not entirely deserted. As we entered a three-way street junction, lit only by a few faraway home lights, two young men on a … Continue Reading »
Several years ago my brothers (Lanny and Doug) and I were on Long Island where Doug, a well-known performer of modern Jewish music, had a concert scheduled. The show was set for 7:30 p.m., with a sound check an hour earlier, but it was just 4:45 and Doug was hungry. Because a full … Continue Reading »
My mother died ten years ago this week, and I am brought to think of the vanishing point, that not-so-distant past beyond which none of us can know the fathers and mothers who brought us here.
My parents were flesh to me, as were both grandmothers. I never knew either grandfather, but they are romance and … Continue Reading »
Everything grew easily where I grew up. In the long Southern California seasons of sun and moderate warmth, there was no challenge.
I suspect, looking back, that such gardening ease actually produced a glory of flowering plants, but there are only two in my childhood memory: zinnias and nasturiums. When I was eight, I planted … Continue Reading »
Ellis Island
So here’s how the story goes, as told to me by my Uncle Max (long-deceased).
Somewhere in the early 1880s, a man by the name of Tudrus Zlutchin (another branch of the family claims that the surname was Dudek) landed at Ellis Island from Russia with his wife and three (maybe two, maybe four) children. … Continue Reading »
Administration after administration has perceived Cuba as an irritant inside our hemispheric shell and coated it with layer after layer of economic and political nacre, which unlike mother-of-pearl, has not created value. In fact, U.S. policy has rendered Cuba nearly irrelevant.
Fidel, of course, has been the focus of our sedimentary relationship, one that has … Continue Reading »
The Grinnell College men’s basketball team once scored 149 points in a game…and lost.
Last night, however, with the temperature in Grinnell, IA (pop. ~10,000), well below zero, the team’s nearly unique playing style heated up the crowd as the Pioneers trounced the Knox College (IL) Prairie Fire 100-80, bringing their record to 15-7. John Grotberg, … Continue Reading »
What actually happens is not always in the history books.
I grew up in California in the 50’s, graduating from high school in 1961, only 16 years after World War II ended. So how was it possible that in all my classes there was not one mention of the internment of Americans of Japanese … Continue Reading »
