Archive for the ‘ Family ’ Category

The Vows Column at 20

NY Times It can’t have been twenty years! I remember when this column started and for awhile it was my favorite – even if the couples in it were almost always too good to be real. My marriage, which started in Manhattan in 1965, ended tragically in Los Angeles, where Beth got rid of me in [ READ MORE ]

Women Who Destroy Men

This is not something I am supposed to talk about. But someone should be, and why not me? This is a pattern I have noticed over and over – beginning in my own family, where no love was lost between my parents – who were nominally a man and a women, but were really something [ READ MORE ]

A Man’s Body Should Be His Castle

It’s better than a castle really, it’s a whole universe – and it deserves everyone else’s respect. But this respect is not always forthcoming. What to do in cases like this? Everyone has his own strategy, I suppose. But mine involves two steps: recognizing rejection when I feel it – this validates my feelings. Then, instead [ READ MORE ]

A Sense of Inferiority and Self-Doubt

NY Review - The New World of William Carlos Williams This is about poetry, of which my father (as everyone else in his time and place) had no interest at all. But if he was not interested in poetry, poetry was interested in him – as part of the Waste Land it was writing about. I [ READ MORE ]

The Digital Revolution

Sometimes a name can make a big difference, it gives us something to talk about and refer to. I now want to describe a new name, or label. I will explain it with some personal history. When I graduated as an Electrical Engineer from the University of Illinois in 1959, Electronics was just becoming established, [ READ MORE ]

Why Were the Marines in Haiti?

My father became a Marine, because of the Depression. He served from 1930 to 1934, most of that time in Haiti. I have always wondered what the Marines were doing there – and assumed it was to protect American business interests, but could find nothing to substantiate this. I just bought Haiti: the Aftershock of [ READ MORE ]

The Narrowly-Focused Mind

My mother used to tell me “You have a one-track mind.” And she was right. I still do, and that is one of my problems. But it also a problem of many other people. They are well-versed in certain areas, but ignorant of most others. McGilchrist would say their left-hemisphere (with its tendency towards specialization) [ READ MORE ]

My Mother was a Madonna

Since this was the case, you know who I was – and you know what my life’s biggest problem has been. We even had a large colored photograph, taken by my father, of mother and me (as a baby) modeled on the Italian Renaissance Madonna paintings, proudly displayed on our living-room wall. Eventually this became embarrassing to [ READ MORE ]

Co-Dependency

This physic discovery swept California in the Eighties like a bonfire. Tom Wolf’s novel was also published during the same period. When I lived in San Diego, you could attend a different CODA (Co-Dependency Anonymous) meeting every night of the week, and some nights had two meetings in different parts of town. When I moved [ READ MORE ]

My Problem With People

This problem has been residing at some lower level in my psyche, and has now decided to surface – whether I want it to or not. Now that I have written this sentence, I am analyzing it – and realizing that the “I” I used so glibly is really a bunch of things, must of [ READ MORE ]

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