“Mostly, though, we all laughed together because so much more makes us similar than what makes us different—albeit critically different. And I would say, too, wonderfully different.”
“Excuse me, do you have an extra cigarette?” I asked a woman outside New York Penn Station on my way home from Reunions in June. As I inhaled, the previous nine months began to transform from life to memory, things that were happening to things that had happened, becoming things that had happened to me rather than things I had made happen.
William Shakespeare once wrote, “A fart by any other name would smell as stanky.” And it does: See toot, or passed gas, or broken wind, or cut cheese. Each euphemism refers to the same thing, and that thing is the … Read More
Brian introduced me to rap music on bus #177 in what I think was fourth grade. I know it was 177 and not 181 or 161 because this memory is accompanied by a host of other unique sensory inputs: the … Read More
“By the eighth day words had begun to fail me. I thought in silent images. It was hot. We ate greedily, excessively, grilled meat on the bone, whole fish smiling up from the table, savory noodles prepared in cold sesame sauce with fresh cucumber. I sat around for hours after lunch feeling uncomfortably full.”
“Granny began losing her memory. Last spring, she mailed me a ripped-out page of an English course catalogue for Middlebury College. I couldn’t tell if she had forgotten that I go to Princeton.”
“Come to Chabad for dinner with me and Hannie tonight!” It’s early in October when my roommate, Molly, makes the invitation. In my ignorance, I thought she was just pronouncing “Shabbat” differently and that we’d be going to the CJL for dinner.
