Five Years Without a Sky Above Me
My father died five years ago yesterday, on January 5, 2015. His death was sudden—I’d spoken to him the day before, and I’d had emails from him that morning. My brother talked to him that evening as our dad decided to go to the hospital because of some abdominal pain. Dad arrested in the hospital […]
Random Memory of My Dad, the Butcher
On Father’s Day, of course, I think of my father. And in the summertime, I think of summers long ago. This year, a random memory of my father popped into my head—I remembered going to see my father work as a butcher while he was in graduate school. I’ve mentioned before that we lived in […]
A Tale of Two Trunks
When I went away to college at age seventeen, I took my mother’s college trunk with me. She had been given the trunk when she went to college in 1951. When she gave it to me in 1973, it had sat in the unfinished part of the basement in my parents’ house ever since I […]
The Chemical Reactivity of Metals: A Science Project
I rarely entered science fairs as a student, but when I was in the seventh grade, everyone in the class was required to submit some project to the school science fair as part of our Science grade. I moaned at home about needing a topic, and my father suggested I do something on how metals […]
Learning to Play Chess
I’ve written before about our family’s competitiveness in playing games (see here and here). One of the early memories I have of living in the new home my parents built in 1963 is of my father teaching my brother and me how to play chess. We moved into the house in October 1963, so our […]
What’s In a Name? I Found Out in Fourth Grade
My fourth-grade teacher was a rather strict nun whose name I cannot remember. (I think she’d taken the name of two male saints—Sister James Thomas, or something of the sort.) There were forty-eight students in the class, and one of Sister’s first acts in the school year was to declare that she couldn’t have so […]
Random Photo: An Old IBM-XT . . . Or Maybe It’s a Clone
This random photo was taken in December 1986, when our family visited my parents for Christmas. I found an envelope of pictures taken during that trip, and, since many of the pictures had Christmas motifs, I will save them for December posts. But this picture is of an early IBM personal computer—the IBM-XT, or a […]
Reflections on Past and Present (and Future) After a Visit to the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum
One of the places that my husband, mother-in-law, and I visited in California in June was the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, where Nixon was born. None of us had been there before, and we spent a pleasant half-day going through the exhibits. The topics covered included Nixon’s childhood, his early […]
Random Photo of My Dad Fishing
I’ve mentioned before that my father was usually the photographer in our family. That means there aren’t too many pictures of him taken on his camera. Occasionally, someone would snap a photo of him, but many of the pictures we have of him were taken by rank amateurs and are blurry or poorly framed or […]
A Story I Don’t Want To Tell: Piercing My Ears (for National Piercing Day)
I’ve been meaning to write the story of how I came to pierce my ears, though even thinking about it makes me squeamish. I recently learned that May 16 is National Piercing Day, so I have no excuse for further procrastination. It’s time to ’fess up. During the summer I was seventeen, after I graduated […]