Observations

        I was at Hampshire, in my second year, when my mother found my birth father’s obituary in the NY Times after looking for it for years.     I don’t know what made her think he would die fairly young – he was 66 – but she read the obituaries year after year with a quiet determination.     It wasn’t easy to buy a copy of the Times – the campus store didn’t have it, and you wouldn’t necessarily find it by taking the bus to Amherst either – so I went to the library and fished it out of a bin of recently arrived newspapers.     The library was silent, not in the hushed way of people trying to be quiet as they did research, but in an empty, echoing kind of way.     I could still bend back then, so I settled onto the carpet to read it.     It covered his time in the Navy in WWII, his years writing for Life and as a professor at Columbia.     But mostly they covered his books and the controversies they c...

        Trying to juggle a ton of medical appointments and a lot of clients in crisis, I haven’t had time to let the announcement of Hampshire College’s closing really sink in until now.     It’s a huge loss, not just for me personally – which is especially painful because I met Kate S there – but also for all the queer kids and the oddballs who need a safe place to land.     Hampshire was the only college that was willing to look past my strange high school transcript, where the grades were all over 90 or failing in what looked like a completely random pattern.  My grades were a barometer of each teacher’s feelings about the importance of physically being in their class.  Some teachers were OK with the fact that I was busy going to protests and speaking at hearings and doing press interviews, as long as I could pass the tests.  Other teachers could not imagine anything being more important than being in the...

4/23/26       Yesterday I woke up miserable with the third day of the same damn headache, but I had stuff to deal with, the gnats of daily life – banking, inexplicable twin letters from the insurance stating that my CT was both pending and approved, weeds taking over the front garden. I brushed Smokey’s grey fur off my sweatshirt and headed out into the equally grey day.       Across the street I came across an unfamiliar cat, a small tortoiseshell, sitting behind a neighbor’s driveway fence.  “Do you live here?” I asked her, looking to see if anyone was home, but all the lights were off.  She was clean and not too thin, so I figured she probably did, and walked on, but when I looked back she had slipped between the fence bars onto the sidewalk.     The few minutes I spent lingering with the cat slowed me down enough that I missed the B63 by half a block. It’s easier to for me to walk fifteen ...

  April 16,     2026       Heading in to “the City” as Manhattan is often called by long-time Bay Ridge denizens, I ran into Samuel, who greeted me enthusiastically.  He’s one of those constantly energetic people that make me a little tired just to think about.  I had been up battling with my mind for most of the night and felt like a zombie, but he was undeterred. “What’s up?”! he said loudly even though I was right next to him.          I actually like Samuel – he has told me many stories about how he was working in corporate IT for a business that sent him to big finance companies to set up their systems and then they were hired by Safe Horizon, a non-profit.  “I had to promise not to tell where these buildings were because they were Safe Houses for battered women,” he said and then went on, “I saw that they had these classes and stuff, to help the women get their lives back,...

4/15/26       It was a rough night between my sadness at the news that Hampshire College, my alma mater and the place I met Kate is closing and my jitters about my appointment with the Director of Complex Spine Surgery today. At about 7:30am, I answered my phone and a heavily accented voice informed me that she was one of our clients, living in a shelter, and had no summer clothes. The list of clothing resources was at the office, so I promised to get back to her and made myself the strongest cup of Earl Grey I have ever had.       When I got to Mt. Sinai, the young man checking people in, who will hopefully never have a personal reason to know the difference, tried to send me to neurology rather than neurosurgery. Once I clarified, he said “8th Fl.” and pointed the way to an elevator. When I got out, I thought I was in the wrong place, because there was nothing but long grey halls in both directions with very little signage and the s...

Rounding the corner of my extremely annoying hedge, I ran right into an older bearded man who lives down the block. I don’t know his name, but I know him by his dog. When the dog first arrived, he was a tiny puppy, only 8 weeks, no identifiable breed but a striking tobacco brown coat with white socks and paws and blue eyes. His owner told me he had brought him up from the south. It was clear early on that he was going to be a big dog- his white paws were way out of proportion to his tiny body. Since then whenever I run into them, he is bigger and bigger and now he is the size of a lab but his fur is longer. He knows me so as soon as he saw me, he reared up and put his paws on me and started licking my hands. Then he started sniffing me. “Do you smell the cats?” I asked him. “Does he like cats?” I ask his owner. “Not particularly, he’s just a people person.” I am still laughing to myself about this description after I wish them a good day and continue on. I passed the corner and...