The bank paid off one of my certificates of deposit (CD) early to refinance at a lower rate. My broker suggested one of two things: 1) buy a 3-month Treasury that paid 5% interest, or 2)  a one-year Note that paid 4.5%.  I chose the longer Treasury despite the lower rate.  If the F

The mother sitting across from me at the lunch table sighed when I asked about her daughter.  “She’s thinking about moving to Pennsylvania.  Since she works from home, she can live anywhere.  Rural Pennsylvania seems to be the one place where houses are affordable. “ The dile

At the retirement center, a woman approached me to compliment a  blog I had written.  My reply was to shrug and say the words hadn’t amounted to much.   Later, I recanted, realizing my false humility had made light of her opinion. To be honest, I’d worked hard on that blog. Wh

If life feels frustrating, there’s a reason. Frustration is a condition throughout the universe.  Even electrons are vulnerable. Because an imbalance exists between the places for them in one layer of the quantum soup and another, each time the layers interact, the quantum particle

Henry David Thoreau’s, Waldon Pond was assigned reading in my undergraduate years but I managed to avoid the book.  Not until my 70s when I was recuperating from surgery did  I turn to it and then, only because it was the one volume I could reach without getting out of bed.  I fl

Before he took his life to escape the ravages of ALS, a gentleman with a wicked sense of humor shared this thought about his neighbor:  She is a woman of strong opinions—most of them wrong. A little wicked myself, I laughed but felt guilty afterward. Even so, the witticism was apt.

Many artists have recorded the song “You’ve Got to be Taught” from the musical South Pacific. Barbara Streisand is among them. It’s a song about hate. Actor John Kerr in the original film version explains. ”It happens after you’re born.” The philosopher John Locke would

A friend of mine took a series of tests to determine her mental decline as she aged. Happily, for her, the tests were comforting.  Even so, I admired her courage.  What she’d done was like poking a sleeping bear with a sharp stick.  If the news hadn’t been good, how would she h

Getting Lost to Find Home, my upcoming memoir, will reveal my childhood relationship with my father was a rocky one.  We didn’t make our separate peace until I’d graduated from college.  Even then, communication wasn’t easy.  He was an Indiana farm boy with an 8th-grade educa

I’ve told this story before. Theodore Dreiser gave a lecture at a university where a young man seated in the audience was writing his doctorate on Dreiser’s, Sister Carrie. After the presentation, the student collared the author to talk about his dissertation, hoping to validate h