Archive for Friendship – Page 2

Commas and Semicolons…

I’ve never had a literary agent or an editor, but I developed a deep appreciation for the skill set after hearing Mary Norris, copy editor at the New Yorker, read from her book Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen several years ago. But there’s a film playing in theaters now that has expanded that appreciation exponentially.

Turn Every Page is a documentary that chronicles the fifty-year relationship of Robert Gottlieb, the editor-in-chief at Alfred A. Knopf Inc. and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Caro. The film is the result of a seven year-long project by Lizzie Gottlieb, Robert’s daughter and an accomplished film maker in her own right. read more

Update: 46,000 and Counting…

Al-Jezeera  reported this an hour ago (February 19). That’s where the death count in southeast Turkey and the northwest corner of Syria stands today. Two weeks ago, a 7.8  earthquake devastated the area, opening cracks in the earth, taking down buildings and crushing everything below. It looks like 9/11 x 10 with rescue and recovery made even more difficult by a civil war, lack of access, blocked border crossings, snow, and freezing temperatures. Every day the death toll increases, but rescue teams are still uncovering live victims from beneath the piles of rebar and blocks of concrete left in the quake’s aftermath. One million living in UN-supplied tents on the Turkish side. Aid blocked to the Syrian side. read more

Dry January…

Two days until the end of my Dry January…

On Friday night a friend asked me why I wasn’t drinking at our granddaughter’s birthday celebration. I deflected. The answer is complicated but it’s about gratitude… and grace. Here’s the story.

Marilynn and I have “cocktail hour” almost every night. We’ve set that time aside to be together without an agenda. It’s our little ritual. We continued it during Dry January. M still had her glass of wine but I went dry. I’m looking forward to the taste of my first Rangpur Tanqueray martini on Wednesday (recipe on request), but I chose to observe Dry January as a reminder that alcohol almost killed me once and how grateful I am that it didn’t.  read more

Anti-Semitic Fever Dream

The two 4-inch square brass plaques in the photo below are stolpersteine (“stumbling stones” in German). They are embedded in the sidewalk in front of my former apartment at 14 Ruhlaerstrasse in Berlin. Edith and Willy Lindenberg lived there until November 11, 1941 when they were deported to a concentration camp in Minsk (Belarus) and murdered simply because they were Juden (Jewish). The plaques are part of the stolpersteine project created in 1992 by German artist Gunter Deming.

The plaques are to commemorate the victims and remind all who “stumble” across them of the Nazi’s “final solution”– to obliterate all “racially inferior” non-Aryans. They are placed in front of the last known residences of those deported and murdered during the Holocaust. As of 2019 there were more than 75,000 stolpersteine in 1200 locations in Western Europe. read more

Fiction or Non-Fiction?

I’ve forgotten what M was reading, but years ago, when we were newly together, I asked her whether she preferred fiction or non-fiction. The answer came quickly, “No question,” she said, “I don’t have time for fiction.” Just the facts, Jack. Since then our tastes and preferences have evolved, but at the time it signaled a startling difference between us.

We were both early readers, but I didn’t hit my stride until I encountered John Steinbeck in high school. M, on the other hand, was a voracious young reader. So were her parents, and they encouraged her. Anything with pages was OK. Kids books, Book of the Month Club selections, historical novels…especially those with a little romance. She was a late bloomer and hid in books. When she did bloom, she used them to hide from me and all the other bloom-snatching high school predators. read more