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First Prize 2009 Latte Essay Awards. My uncle Henry Robbins was the God of Books. When a massive heart attack felled him at New York’s 14th Street subway station nearly three decades ago, he was also Dutton’s Editor-in-Chief. Others may have written the books, but he brought them full blown to life[...]
My greatest challenge as a Seventh-Grade English teacher in “inner-city” Brooklyn was to gain firm control — not of my classroom — but of a pair of scissors. In the three years I spent in the public school system, I was an interior decorator- a sort of pedagogical Martha Stewart — almost as much as [...]
The thought of traveling always fills me with dread. I approach any major trip, no matter how delightful it promises to be, wondering, How will I cope? What will become of me? There are many ways to deal with travel anxiety — the best of which, in my view, is to stay home. Until last [...]
José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva cups his hands and blows into them, the hot breath of hope on a cold day. Far from his native home of Brazil, he walks along the edge of a tiny island off Sweden. This is no leisurely stroll on some sunny, sandy beach. The frigid Baltic Sea surrounds [...]
In his will, my 87-year-old lawyer father included the proviso that the definition of grandchildren who would benefit from his estate included, in addition to any extant grandchildren, “any child born to any of my three children up to and including nine months from the date of my death.” What was he thinking? That one [...]
In the recent Year of the Snake — I remember because it’s my daughter’s sign — the image of a maroon suitcase made of camphor wood began to follow me like a phantom. It became most vivid in the dusk as I drove home from work, when my mind was free from corporate politics and [...]
The year was 1958. Needs were jostling one another in my fretful mind. My chief concern was measuring up to the promise of a marvelous marriage. This was all tangled up with making things. We loved making things together, partly because we were too broke to buy them, but mostly because the making was fun. [...]
The modernist Marcel Duchamp once argued that America’s only contribution to art (aside from phenomenal plumbing) are her bridges. My four-year-old twins might agree.
I knew it was a mistake to vote. There’s something un-American about voting, after all. I mean, sure, it’s great that we can vote, but to actually go through it — to get hold of one of those hard-to-find registration forms, fill it out, wait for your voting card in the mail and then show up on a workday at some high school you never heard of and stand on line to pull a lever on those ancient machines — well, if you ask me, it all smacks of some kind of nutty European socialism.
On Thursday, I took a water taxi out to the Fire Island lighthouse museum with Lucy and her family. The museum was closed, but the park ranger was nice enough to let us in to watch a video about the lighthouse. “It’s very homemade,” she warned us as she popped it in the VCR, thus defusing my sneering cynicism before I could even get it started. Afterwards, Lucy and her family took the water taxi back, but I decided to walk, lured by rumors of a nude beach in the vicinity[...]