I joyously celebrate all holidays, except one. I don’t even mind the enforced bacchanal of St. Patrick’s Day (and, yes, I live near Boston). Valentine’s Day, however, seems to put an undue strain both on one’s emotional and economic resources.  When I was young – )and often, not in love or in the kind of…

I live in landscape hell. I know that this is not the only place in the United States that people, when they find themselves there, are seized by the urge to release the visual artist they always wanted to be and probably never released before for good reason.  It is said that on Cape Cod,…

It seems that I have a mental quirk that causes me to have nightmares on the night before I give a speech or teach a big class or otherwise perform any other important obligation. It’s not that I dread these obligations. Even when I’m looking like a mushroom, I’m pretty comfortable with public focus, having…

By this point in my life, I could live in a place with better (or at least more even) weather. The reasons I don’t are many and varied – chief among them is that my grown children live nearby and I like seeing them more than a few times a year. In March, when the…

My children used to think that it was exciting to get up at 4 a.m. and go out shopping on so-called, “Black Friday,” the day apparently consecrated to holiday sales. Then, one of my daughters saw a stampede at an electronics store in which a woman’s leg was broken – and that put a stop…

Men think they are attractive because they are powerful. Or smart. Or fit. Let me tell you a secret. I know the truth about what women find most attractive in a man – and it’s not money and it’s not a title. I once asked one of my daughters, what would a woman do for…

As I finished work on my most recent novel (Here, Below the Surface, to debut in 2023), I realized that I had somehow incorporated (yet again) a plot point that reflects my obsession with women changing their names when they marry.  I’ve thought about this since I first married and was told, by the school…

If you want to really know someone, follow him home. That was the reasoning behind Stephanie’s Halloween assignment for the correspondents of American Eye, the Chicago-based TV magazine where I worked right out of college.  “The greats,” said our producer. “We’re going to take our viewers home, to the very places where the greats created…

The reason that I buy things off eBay is not just because they’re less expensive. Or rather, not only because they’re less expensive, but because: There is only one item, like it or not It’s mailed to you You don’t have to experience a fitting room I don’t shop.  Some of the worst experiences of…

I am one of those people.  Cat owners know me on sight. They feel my loathing. Cats, of course, are cunning … and they know me right away, as well. They make a big pretense of sliding up to me and entwining their snakey selves around my legs or shoulders so that I will haplessly…