Fifteen years ago today, I stood up in a tuxedo in front of my friends and family and watched the most beautiful woman in the world walk down an aisle towards me while a string trio played classical music and everyone we knew watched us stand together and speak magic words that would change us [...]
Today is the 4th anniversary of my dad, Joel Dobbin’s, last breath. On other anniversaries, I have mourned him and shared the feelings and thoughts attending the mourning. On this one, what I want to do is bring him back. Not forever, but for a time, and I want to do it by having his [...]
So on Friday, February 22, 2013, I had somehow found my way to being a featured storyteller at an event called “The MOuTH at the Mark Twain House.” It was organized and spearheaded by NPR personality, voice, and all-around-rockstar Chion Wolf. Originally, it was supposed to be in conjunction with the MOTH Radio people, but [...]
Hopefully, one day you all might get a chance to read it. A Forward for Parents (Children, feel free to skip this part and get to the good stuff) “Yet the old time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as “historical” in the children’s library; for the time has come for [...]
My littlest one goes to kindergarten next fall. Quite a journey from that early diagnosis and intervention. We’re still on it, the journey, to be sure. But there are no words to tell how amazed or how proud I am of this brilliant, tough, wonderful little girl, who taught herself how to learn in the [...]
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 [...]
