My 3.5-year-old Macbook Pro went on the disabled list Wednesday. Symptoms: Normal start up, but then, as the blue screen and desktop icons appeared, so did the spinning beach ball of death…and a queasy stomach. Interior sirens wailing, I rushed to my not-too-far-away Apple Store where, amid dozens of milling i-enthusiasts, the patient was taken [...]
Category Archives: Anecdotes
A Teenager Selling Shoes
July 14, 2011 – 9:06 am
Marty Stein and Benny Silverstein operated shoe stores in Oxnard, my California childhood’s small town. Marty’s store (Kirby’s Shoes) was on A Street’s east side, right next to my father’s men’s & boys’ clothing store. Benny’s store (GallenKamp’s Shoes) was directly across the street. Marty carried a marginally higher-priced line, but in a town that [...]
Shoe Polish and History…Repeating
July 14, 2011 – 12:43 am
A guest post by my oldest child, Emily. * * * * * I had this memory of my father. I was very young, and he was shining shoes. I well-remembered the smell, and the mess, and how careful he was with the polish in the little tubs. Everything was kept in a shoebox, and [...]
A Bully Story
June 26, 2011 – 4:22 pm
Every once in a while I come across a blog post that deserves wider reading. Hollye Dexter wrote one today. I reprint it unchanged below. The original is here. * * * * * When I started the seventh grade all the other kids seemed to tower over me in the halls. The girls had [...]
No Sunglasses, No Service
May 23, 2011 – 12:30 am
I know a woman (she shall remain nameless) who loses her sunglasses repeatedly. A retired attorney, she is neither careless nor insouciant. It just happens. And each time her cheaters go AWOL, she reacts with dismay and a bit of self-directed anger. Then, after a mourning period shortened imperatively by the next glary day, her [...]
Henry VIII for a Five-Year-Old
April 7, 2011 – 9:54 pm
One of my daughters, a medieval history scholar and expert on European royalty, recently acquired a Henry VIII mug with images of his six wives surrounding him. Appropriately, when the Queens get into hot water (e.g., tea or coffee), their heads disappear. What she hadn’t anticipated was how fascinated her five-year-old daughter would be with [...]
Teaching Contract Bridge to Intelligent Women
February 17, 2011 – 3:16 pm
I learned contract bridge at 13 and played through grad school. Then came almost 40 years without a bid. But for the last year or so, I’ve been teaching bridge to a group of women. It has been a particularly satisfying endeavor for two reasons: 1) they are members of AAUW—American Association of University Women—and [...]
Profile: Bert James, Mountain of a Man
December 21, 2010 – 2:36 pm
Albert’s Place dressed up for the movies Bert James is a huge, bearded man who can build, drive, or fix anything. When I arrived at his place five miles north of I-90 near Kingston, Idaho, I expected to and did see him astride one of him many machines. We first met when he approached me [...]
Dog Gone
October 29, 2010 – 1:39 pm
My daughter recently put her 13-year-old cat down. Her post about it was heartfelt and touching. Today Lee Geiger, a chum from my Wall Street days, wrote about saying farewell to his dog. I reprint his goodbye below. * * * * * This is not a good day. The Fat Guy is driving me [...]
Sheiks on a Plane
May 6, 2010 – 3:19 pm
Ali Balak Qatlar Satif Luwi Qatlar On a balmy Saturday morning in late-1978, two 30-something brothers boarded a Pacific Southwest Airlines flight in Los Angeles. As they walked up the outdoor stairway into the PSA jet, the two men looked suspiciously like Arab terrorists during a time when Arab terrorism was non-existent. They were traveling [...]
