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 stomach does not make for a comfortable and melodious performance, Doug opted for a snack at a nearby Sunrise Highway diner.
Irrepressibly True Tales
One man's squint at the metaphorical signposts, songbirds, soapboxes, street musicians, and hot dog stands of life. Criticism, lyricism, polemics, performance, and making change…all with mustard.
The Vanishing Point
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 tragedy to imagine. Continue reading “The Vanishing Point”
Flowers Bugged Me
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 zinnias Continue reading “Flowers Bugged Me”
Ellis Island Vignette
So here’s how the story goes, as told to me by my Uncle Max (long-deceased).
Somewhere in the late 1890s (I could be off by ten years), 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. He came from a shtetl just outside of Nizhni Novgorod (now Russia’s third-largest city). Continue reading “Ellis Island Vignette”
After Fidel
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 hardened into clay, unmoving through ten U.S. presidencies. But with the announcement that Castro is stepping down after nearly 50 years, turning stewardship over to his brother Raul, the U.S. has an opportunity. Will the next president step out of the clay and back into the mud where things are sticky, sloppy, murky, but once again movable? Continue reading “After Fidel”
“Running to Win!” in Iowa
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, Grinnell’s leading scorer, had 37 points, giving him a career total of 2,014, and his junior year isn’t over yet. (I watched the game live on a streaming internet feed.) Continue reading ““Running to Win!” in Iowa”