Until I was nine, the church we attended was forty-five minutes away; we went twice every Sunday, so altogether that was three hours spent in a car. Those trips are vivid in my mind: passing... Read More

CHARLES DARWIN'S EVOLUTION, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, and Albert Einstein’s relativity have all become fundamental concepts in modern science, but if you ask the person on the street to explain any of them (especially the latter)... Read More

THE SOFTCOVER BOOK, given to me at age thirteen, was called Ten Rungs by Martin Buber. The philosophical sayings were different from the philosophy books my dad used to read to me many evenings, yet... Read More

Our last combat mission was my worst experience of the war, but it taught me the most. We landed on the X, which basically means right on top of them. There were two objectives, so... Read More

AFTER I FINALLY WRAPPED my six-year-old head around the use of the double “that” in a sentence and agonizingly extrapolated the definition of “fib” from a difficult Franklin the Turtle read, I discovered that there... Read More

I BELONG TO A REALLY exclusive club—but not by choice. Eleven years ago I “escaped” from a hospice program and became one of the few lucky survivors who still walk this good earth. Before I... Read More

I LOVED MY MOTHER. I’m sure you love your mother, too. Joan Adele Rice Naff (1931-2015) would be indignant to find clichés here, so let’s muscle the mush out of the way. She died December... Read More