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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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George, the Lobster It was the ninth day of our eleven day tour of the Canadian Maritimes. We had started in Nova Scotia where the attractions were the striking natural beauty of the landscape and certain remnants of its early history. We had toured a replica of the Hector, the first ship to bring Scottish…

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