in central slip, c. 1977

the old man...

...it's his birthday today. If he was still around he'd probably want to go see a movie. Is there anything with Meryl Streep or Bill Murray playing right now? He died in 1993. When he was alive he'd sometimes drive me nuts, inspiring me to intone, "My dad, wrong or wrong!" And I unfortunately seem to have inherited his temper. I'm working on that. But I also inherited his sense of humor, movie buff-ness, interest in art, science and history, and a penchant for getting into a particular subject and then wanting to read everything about it. With me right now, it's the world of Eleanor of Aquitaine. My dad, at different times, had Virginia Woolf, Thomas Jefferson, Cripple Creek, Colorado and the poetry of Wallace Stevens as his enthusiasms, to name a few. We all, if we were listening, learned along with him, because along with the temper there comes a genetic tendency to pontificate, or as we call it in our family, breathe. And did I mention the...

a rare find

A rare find - some very old photos from my father's side of the family. They must have belonged to my grandmother, as she made notations on one, and another was inscribed to her.

the tee shirts of my life, #1 — the hometown news

I have been going through some drawers, trying to clear things out, and found a bunch of old tee shirts that I hadn't seen in ages. Most were saved by my mom, I think. And did they bring me back. It's amazing how something like an old tee shirt could tell a story. For instance, this shirt, from the mid-70s. I didn't know that any of these had survived. My dad was a newspaperman , who worked the political beat for New Jersey papers The Newark News and later, The Daily Observer, which operates out of Ocean County. In the '70s he decided he wanted to be his own boss and opened a local weekly paper called The Hometown News . He did everything — wrote the stories, taught my mom and me how to do layout, took and developed the photos in the darkroom (which he taught my brother and me how to do, too), sold advertising (until he could hire someone else to do that), even delivered the papers to stores and to the homes of paper boys and girls. And h...

famiglia

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