life | Mostly Bright Ideas

Browsing All posts tagged under »life«

Wondering What to Believe (Part 2)

September 25, 2012

My grandmother died on March 3rd, 1966. The event struck the family like a cue ball smacking hard against the pack, scattering everyone to distant parts of New York State, and then to the far reaches of the country. Heading northwest out of the Bronx, my immediate family began to adjust to the exotic landscape […]

Wondering What to Believe (Part 1)

September 16, 2012

I am like a lot of people. In the beginning, long before I knew what was happening, religion was planted inside of me. Grafted, really. Nourished by holy water and incense, its vines spread everywhere, like ivy growing up around the trunk and along the branches of an evergreen. Soon it was impossible to tell […]

Life Isn’t Fair

September 6, 2012

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My parents said a lot of things, and most of the time I had no idea what they meant. I was never sure if my inability to follow them was a reflection of my own ignorance, or if it was possible that what they were saying made no sense. “You can’t win for losing,” my […]

True Love

August 17, 2012

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My daughter, Allison, is suffering under the delusion that she’s getting married today. This is impossible, of course, because she’s just a little girl. Okay, she’s not really a little girl. She was born in 1985, and if you subtract that number from the year it is now, she’s twenty-seven. So if you want to […]

Ruminating About Gum

August 12, 2012

I don’t remember the first time I was allowed to chew gum. It’s one of those milestones in life that nobody bothers to record. Your mother might write down when you finally said a real word, or managed to tie your own shoes, but there’s never any mention of the gum-chewing accomplishment. And that’s a […]

Inexplicably Irritated

August 3, 2012

We all have them. Those insignificant things that drive us so crazy, they make us want to yank out our own hair by the fistful. But we don’t do it, because we know how painful a little paper cut is, and we can imagine that tearing out clumps of hair and scalp would have to […]

From Small Minds

July 9, 2012

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I have a book called The Magic of Thinking Big. It’s a great title, because it explains the entire book in five words, which is why I’ve never read the rest of it. The cover promises that you’ll “acquire the secrets of success and achieve everything you’ve always wanted.” That’s a pretty ambitious claim. But […]

Remember My Name

June 21, 2012

Do you have any idea who Alan Rufus was? He was also known as Alan the Red, if that helps, but it probably doesn’t. If I were the one who had to guess, I’d say he was a stand-up comedian, or a low-level gangster, or someone claiming he’d been abducted from his bed in the […]

Wandering Aimlessly Down Memory Lane

June 12, 2012

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I’m getting old. I thought I was getting old ten years ago, but that was nothing compared to now. On medical forms and written surveys, I’m almost in the last age group, and at some stores I qualify for a senior citizen discount. I’ve been around a long time. Yet I can still remember when […]

Ebb and Flow

April 24, 2012

I hate talking about the weather. And that’s a problem, because where I live, what’s happening in the atmosphere tends to form the basis for most conversation. The temperature, the lack of rainfall, the blueness of the sky, the level of frost in the ground — it’s incessant, and for me, somewhat bewildering. For one […]