Musings
My “Musings” posts will have no defined scope or purpose. I will be writing them just for fun as I strive to develop skill as a writer of creative non-fiction. I have a long way to go, but hope that others will find some of these posts thought-provoking or just fun to read.
Books That Moved Me – Part 4
This is the fourth edition of Books That Moved Me—a tradition dating back to 2016—in which I’ll list the fiction and nonfiction books I’ve liked most since my Books 3 post in January 2023. As in the past, virtually all the books I’ve read have been recommended by a...
Excerpts from Finding Ruby
A number of people have asked why they haven’t been receiving my blog posts lately (most of you have just been silently relieved). The answer is that for the past few years I’ve been working on a book. It’s about my two grandfathers - Rubin (“Ruby”) Schechter and...
Books 3 – Friends Write Back
Apparently ignited by the plea for “help” in my recent Books 3 post, friends have sent a trove of recommendations that could keep me occupied with great fiction and nonfiction books for years. As I looked over the recommendations--some contained in the Comments to the...
Music II—Inching Up The Foothills Of Jazz
This is an account of how, at the age of 61, I found myself whining with frustration, afraid of humiliating myself, and then fired by my piano teacher—all part of a journey that's nevertheless been a highlight of these twilight years. After traipsing around the Dobbs...
My Life in Music – Part l
It began on Christmas in Dobbs Ferry, New York when I was about six, which would have been 1958. I woke my sister Debbie before dawn to get a jump on opening presents. Ripping away the wrapping paper, I discovered a book around the size of a comic book: the Trapp...
Loon Shots
I’ll never forget the first time I saw a loon. She made a fool of me. It was August of 1978, on the first day of a 100 mile canoe trip with my college roommate on the iconic Allagash River in northern Maine--the same trip Thoreau memorialized in his Maine Woods...
A Merganser’s Master Guide to Homeschooling
6:15 am, June 17, 2020Poland, MaineWhoosh! A loud fluttering sounded over the chorus of chirping birds that had already awakened me. Turning quickly to my right, I looked out the large picture window and caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a duck in flight headed...
Are We Still Having “Fun”?
I spent a weekend in Manhattan back in the fall of 2018 with two old college friends: Leslie, a documentary filmmaker who’s lived in Paris for many years, and Bonnie, a recently-retired high school English teacher living on a cattle ranch in the Kansas Flint Hills and...
Watching My Trees Grow
I like to think of them as my trees, two sibling white birches rising out of the bank of Thompson Lake in Poland, Maine. They arch towards the water, just a few yards beyond the screen porch from which I’ve watched them grow since their infancy. I probably shouldn’t...
Subway Diary #3: Life Underground in the Age of Corona
This certainly isn’t an entry I could have imagined writing as the third installment of my Subway Diary--an ode to my love of the New York City subways. But what a difference a few weeks can make— and not just for Joe Biden and Bernie. The heretofore...