Essays 1-20

When I was a child, one of the memorable trips we took was to Nova Scotia. On the way there, my parents took me to a restaurant called The Gloucester House in Gloucester, Massachusetts. They wanted to have seafood, and they wanted their children to experience it, too. They thought of this experience as something…

I recently had a conversation with a friend who had a stroke a few years ago. She is paralyzed on one side of her body, and like me, has to do things more slowly than she used to. That can be quite frustrating. It takes her longer to do simple tasks most people take for…

It’s certainly no coincidence that I’m writing about anger right after I wrote about violence. Violence is a very common and unfortunate companion to anger, and I think it’s a major reason anger has such a bad name. Like sadness, it’s too often seen as something to get rid of quickly, or hide, rather than…

When we were children, we didn’t always get to do what we wanted to do and have what we wanted to have, even if it was available and affordable. If something we wanted appealed to someone bigger than we were, we sometimes had to wait our turn, scrounge for leftovers, or give up altogether. When…

I like Walt Disney Productions’ film “Pollyanna.” For a long time, I thought I liked it because Hayley Mills was so appealing, or because I was so naive. I thought that I’d become a little more cynical when I graduated from the School of Hard Knocks, and I’d become disenchanted with the “glad game” Pollyanna…

When it began to get dark, Misha started to look for Nadyezhda. But by then, they were pretty far from that log, and besides, they all had to be home by dark. Misha was pretty upset. He told the other children, and though some got concerned looks on their faces, most were silent as Fyodor…