One of the themes in my remarks at my dad’s memorial was his love of poetry. He always told us, “poetry was meant to be read aloud.” Last week I traveled to Bloomington, Indiana and had breakfast at a restaurant called Runcible Spoon. The reference felt like a wink from dad: Edward Lear’s “The Owl […]
Books
The “Wilderness Beauty” in Low Standards
One of my former MBA students put this request out to the (Facebook) universe: Just once I’d like to read a time management book by someone who seems to have caregiver requirements. This statement attracted a lot of comments. Including this one: I think it’s high time you write a book. To which the OP […]
Dear, Dear
I love advice columns. My favorite part of reading Dear Abby is laughing about whether someone I know is the correspondent. For example: Dear Abby: My calico cat, Rosie, seems to be fixated on my next-door neighbor Ron. Every morning Rosie grooms herself for an hour, then jumps in the window to watch for Ron…. […]
Late August: Blackberry Thoughts
Photo Credit: @AlfieDies on Twitter, June 16, 2020 Earlier this year, I read the lovely volume The Point of Poetry by Joe Nutt. I had read a few of the poems in that book before, but not many. Seamus Heaney’s “Blackberry-Picking” was a new one for me. The first few lines: Late August, given heavy […]
Hurricane Laura?
It’s a special week to be a Laura, as we might be getting our hurricane this week. As of this writing, it is still just Tropical Storm Laura, but with a Laura, you never know. And thus, it was a good week to read Laura Lippman’s recent book of personal essays, My Life as a […]
No Joking Matter: Feynman on Bureaucracy (Feynman Part 3)
This post is the third and final in a series of reflections on Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, a collection of vignettes by the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. The first posts covered two different reactions I had to the book: indignation and inspiration. In this post, I describe a third reaction, empathetic amusement—on the topic […]
No Joking Matter: Feynman on Research (Feynman Part 2)
This post is the second in a series of reflections on Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, a collection of vignettes by the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. In the previous post, I had my dander up about Professor Feynman’s ogling of the co-eds. I can see that his creepiness was a distraction—for him and for me—from […]
No Joking Matter: Feynman on Women (Feynman Part 1)
I recently read Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman. The book is a collection of vignettes by the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. The title of the book refers to an awkward reaction he got at a prim Princeton social event, where he said yes to both lemon AND cream in his tea. But the phrase has […]
Life Among the Savages
In her memoir of young family life, Life Among the Savages, Shirley Jackson tells the story of the outsize influence of a child’s first grade teacher. We get a delicious profile of her daughter Jannie’s Mrs. Skinner: We had been exposed to Mrs. Skinner from about the third day of school, when Jannie came home […]
Joe the Curmudgeon
Joe Queenan is a crowd-pleaser at my house. When The Sons are home, and we are lingering after a long breakfast served at 1:00 p.m., Queenan’s Wall Street Journal column is good for a laugh. He’s a curmudgeon, especially about things modern. “Uriah the Hittite” is a family meme: [A] couple of years ago, when […]