Susy’s family lived on our block, just a few houses away, and our parents were close friends. In my mind’s eye I can still see our mothers sitting together in our kitchen, me watching in fascination as Susy’s mom twisted the string around her teabag to get the last drop of flavor. And I remember calling for Susy after school and we’d roller skate together for hours around and around the block. And I remember running down to their house early one morning to tell them my baby...
Shintoism has more followers in Japan than any other religion including Buddhism. A polytheistic and animistic religion, Shintoism, like other Eastern faiths, includes the practice of meditation and prayer, and Japan boasts 100,000 Shinto shrines. But Shintoism has no central authority and its practices vary greatly among its adherents . Altho possibly apocryphal, it is said that Joseph Campbell, the famous academic who wrote The Power of Myth, reported the following...
One of the things I was determined to do when I retired was to perfect my French. My husband’s parents were multi-lingual, he heard French spoken at home, and he speaks it fluently. But although I studied French in both high school and college, my mastery of that beautiful tongue was poor, and my husband hadn’t the patience to help. (See Parlez-vous francais?) So I enrolled at New York’s Alliance Francaise and took classes there for an academic year. Then as summer...
My father Arthur and Conkeydoodle’s father Jack were first cousins, so I guess that makes me and Conkey second cousins – or maybe first cousins once removed, we never could quite figure that out. But Conkey was 11 years my senior and had been my babysitter at times, and so actually she felt more like a big sister to me. Of course her name wasn’t really Conkeydoodle but Esther and we’d laugh over the fact that neither of us could remember how I gave her that nickname in the...
“The Bronx? No thonx!”, wrote the poet Ogden Nash. As a kid growing up in the Bronx I didn’t get it. I didn’t realize my borough had a bad rap, and I certainly wouldn’t have understood why. The Bronx was my home and I loved it. (See Parkchester, Celebrate Me Home) I even went to college in the Bronx, but then grad school and marriage finally took me out. But altho I was living elsewhere, I spent four decades of my working life commuting back as a public educator...
Welcome to my blog World Thru Brown Eyes! Enjoy the read and please leave a comment and tell me how this old world looks thru YOUR eyes!
