Posts by Marie Anne Mayeski
The Hide in the Highlands
The Hide* Our night in the hide, there at the Aigas Field Center in the Scottish Highlands, remains a high point in our recent Road Scholar tour. We gathered at about 8:00 p.m., five Road Scholars led by Charlie (Charlotte Gardener), one of the young women Rangers, who led us quietly into the hide. It…
Read MoreCatch Some Air
“Catch Some Air” She glides behind me and I twist my body–with some arthritic squeaks–to watch. Our granddaughter Mairead is on the wakeboard and, though ordinarily she’s a solemn child, I can see a bit of smile even from the boat. Four years ago at seven, she had her first wakeboard experience, managing to “get…
Read MoreAirport Musings
En route to San Francisco, we arrived at LAX around 9:30 for an 11:00 flight and, with boarding passes and driver’s licenses in hand, went through security screening quickly. Turning 75 has had unexpected benefits. Then, everything stops. In the Departures list, our flight was listed as delayed till 12:05; it would, of course, be…
Read MoreSangpen
Thank you for coming.” “Thank you for being here, Sangpen.” This ritual fragment of conversation begins every massage. Sangpen speaks as she comes in, closes the door and dims the lights even more than they are already. I respond from face down on the massage table, my facing poking into the funny support, shaped something…
Read MoreMy Past on the Fringes of the Mafia
A recent casual conversation about Italian restaurants and neighborhoods triggered a whole chain of memories for me. I entered Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in September 1969 to begin a Ph D program in theology. GSAS was on the Rose Hill Campus in the Bronx, fronting the wide and busy Fordham road and…
Read MoreIn and Out Through New York City
I have lived about 11 or 12 years in New York, in two different times in my life. I lived there from the age of two and a half to nine and returned for graduate school in 1969. That’s not a large chunk of a life now over seventy years long, but both times marked…
Read MoreAn Adventure in the Dordogne
If someone asks, what did you do in France, I’m ready to answer, “I visited the caves.” I can imagine the rolling of eyes, the evanescence of interest, the look of unbelief. In the land of fine wine, good food and artistic masterpieces, you visited caves? How can I tell people that these caves were…
Read MoreChristmas Cookies or How I Spent my Christmas Vacation
Christmas Cookies or How I Spent My Christmas Vacation I’m not a baker. Several times a year, when it’s my time to bring choir snacks, I buy refrigerated cookie dough and bake up a dozen or two. Time was when I bought the kind you had to cut into appropriate widths. Now It’s always the…
Read More