• Silence and Respect
    Articles,  Personal

    Monumental Cemetery of Milan

    About 25 years ago, I started playing a computer game called “Civilization”, which was released by MicroProse, a company founded in part by a man named Sid Meier. Meier is a historian and musician as well as a computer programmer.…

  • Estate Sale - Everything Must Go
    Personal

    Surreal

    Author's Note: My mother passed away May 6, 2013. I wrote this, and its companion piece, "Bittersweet", in those first months after her death. A few weeks ago, we reviewed the word "bittersweet". Today, we will discuss "surreal". Spending weekends…

  • Too old to keep.
    Personal

    Bittersweet

    Author's Note: My mother passed away May 6, 2013. I wrote this, and its companion piece, "Surreal", in those first months after her death. We have some excellent words in English: single words that can substitute an entire paragraph of…

  • Personal

    Consciousness

    At some magic age when he’s not quite a man but no longer a child, he will learn that I was a reluctant fraud. For now, he looks at me with doe-brown eyes so clear and curious and ebullient that…

  • WWII Roster Vinar
    Articles,  Personal

    A Jewish Soldier in WWII

    On July 22, 1944, about seven weeks after the beaches of Normandy had been taken in D-Day, the 28th Infantry — the “Iron Division”, as World War One’s General Pershing named it — landed on that same beachhead. The men…