My oldest daughter is at an age now, caught between implicit belief in things and learning how things really work. She can understand how it only seems that the sun rises and sets, but know that we’re on a rotating sphere, which in turn revolves around a cosmic, nuclear furnace. And yet she still believes [...]

I had wanted to write a timely article about Hostess snack cakes, with Hostess filing for bankruptcy being in the news. But between trying to get the kids fed and to sleep and then trying to finish the book I’m writing, it seemed sort of superfluous. But it reminded me of something I had written [...]

(for Donnacha)   A while back, after a punishing rain, I helped clear out my mother’s basement of damaged boxes and old and useless things tucked down there for convenience’s sake, which had grown to an inconvenient tangle of things. Artifacts of our life, of my dad’s life. Important things. I was uniquely qualified to [...]

So my mother recently went to her 40th(45th?) High School reunion and had occasion to speak to an old friend of hers who was also my 7th grade English Teacher. Mrs. Galiette has the distinction of being the only education professional in my entire run of 6th to 8th grade who ended up liking me [...]

It is the two-year anniversary of my dad dying today. Yesterday was his birthday; he very nearly Mark Twained, my Pop. A few days after he died, I found myself in rather a state. Processing not only the fact that he was gone and no longer here and no longer alive, but also, for the [...]

Twenty two years ago, my mother threw my father a surprise 50th birthday party. People from his past came, some across country, to attend… My parents were kind of poor as church-mice, so the guests actually had to pay for the honor of coming, in lieu of a gift. Which they did. My dad could [...]

Fifth grade, my dad came home with a treasure-trove. He had  somehow gotten to be friends with a guy who was making a book-based-air-combat game (this is what people in search of gaming did before there was a computer in every home, folks) involving complex rules and charts. He had already designed a series of [...]

  Summer, 1977. I’m 3. My dad asks me if it was my birthday. “No.” Is it Christmas? Hannukah? “No.” Is it ANY holiday? Arbor Day, maybe? “I don’t think so.” Well, he tells me, since it is no holiday at all and most definitely NOT my birthday, then it must be my UNbirthday, and [...]

I have a series of stories about what I refer to as my “school-jew-fights” that I want to get down on paper for my daughters, for when they are older. I’ll be writing and posting them here from time to time. There were too many individual fights to chronicle completely, but three of them kind [...]

Sometimes, the universe gives you a nice little gift. I found an old ZIP disk (remember those?) that had my dad’s familiar idiosyncratic handwriting across the label. It had “Joel Stuff” as a header and “letters” and “musings” written in underneath. I was eager to read it, as it would be the closest I’m going [...]

So here’s something. We all have our personal mythologies; items and mementos that hold special meaning or that act as talismans to connect the past with the present and forge a notion of physical continuity between them. Something we remember from youth that exists to this day. For me, the necklace that lived around my [...]

Thanks, Captain Marvel. Sunday afternoon nostalgia. I lived for this show on Saturday mornings. I caught a few episodes, by way of Tivo, that aired a few years back on TVLand, or something. They kind of don’t hold up. At all. Flashback to 1979: My father never understood why they changed the comic book character [...]