When I was four years old, an angel left me my very own Christmas tree. I lay on a soft twin bed, tucked in the corner of a wood-paneled...

In first grade, we stood each morning to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. It was the late 1960s and all girls were required to wear...

Yesterday I sat down mid-afternoon, under a robin’s egg blue sky, gazing at the treetops beginning to turn yellow and red. I picked up my...

I saw an old friend last weekend (name and info changed.) Mary is a social worker, a few years older than I, smart and witty, quietly...

I met “The Roses Man” when I was  5 or 6 years old, attending Franklin Elementary School in East Orange, New Jersey. I was freshly...

When I was five, my heaven was a tiny dusty theater at Upsala College in East Orange, New Jersey. My father taught music history there....

I was a senior at Tufts University when I entered a competition with an improbable band comprised of the Rabbi, the Dean, and two other...

In the The Wizard of Oz, little Dorothy, in her blue-checked dress, encounters a series of misfits who become friends. First, she meets...

Picture me at 22 years old, bright eyed with big hair and a big smile to match. I strode the campus of my college, Tufts University, with...

“You should do a TED talk,” a literary agent suggested, as I blinked at her. “A TED talk? What would I even talk about? And how do you...