GrowingOlderHopeWiser

I love Thanksgiving Day, especially the Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City. I remember sitting on my father’s shoulders, watching the parade rise above the crowd. I can still feel the excitement and the cold, and smell the food from the street vendors’ carts. I remember the Christmas decorations,…

I would choose an ordinary day—or maybe a collage of ordinary days—the kind stitched together from small, perfect moments. A Saturday morning watching cartoons and eating pancakes for breakfast. The sounds of my Aunt Mary preparing food in the kitchen, the delicious aroma of slow-cooked hot chocolate, bacon, and maple…

Looking around the room at my Characters, I remember every nuance of their story. It is time to kill your little darlings. That brutally honest moment when a writer faces painful yet necessary decisions to move the story forward. How do you decide which characters or scenes to cut? The…

The big 70 keeps coming; I’m running as fast as I can, which isn’t saying much; I can’t run fast enough. 5 more days until I’m officially in my seventies. How the heck did I get here? As I patch up the parts that are falling off, dragging behind, or…

What’s the last movie that made you cry? Two movies have made me cry the most, and both left impressions I still remember — including where I was when I watched each. The 2025 film Frankenstein, written, co-produced, and directed by Guillermo del Toro, made me cry. I think this…

They are watching me. By “they,” I mean the dolls. For some reason, everyone seemed to like giving me dolls, even though they scared the hell out of me with their glassy stares, occasional winks, and creepy “Mama.” I became obsessed with covering them up in my room. They sat…

“The world’s most expensive coffee, a truly unique experience for any coffee lover.” Fernando, our Panama City tour guide, went on and on as we approached a local Casco Viejo coffee house known for serving the world-famous Geisha coffee.  The oppressive heat and humidity had taken their toll on me,…

The better question for me is why I should want to? Things always happen for some reason. If we get rid of history from our memory, how will we learn from the mistakes of the past?  The Romans had a term for this, namely damnatio memoriae, which was known as…

5:19 AM Isabelle wrote a word here and there on a blank page. She had been stuck for over a week. She was beginning to fear she’d never write again or that her writing was mediocre at best. Was it the discovery of AI and playing with the image features?…