“I want to report an imminent death”, I said, controlling my voice to cover the strain. It still didn’t sound right, in particular to my writer’s ear. How could one report something that hasn’t happened yet when the event itself weighs heavy with finality? All the tenses were wrong, while the verbs, adjectives and nouns… Continue Reading
Author Archives: Sidney Stark
Ice-cream in Chinatown
I wrote a blog post in January called Something the Social Worker Said. Essentially, it explored the issue of self-knowledge, but I remember the discussion I had that prompted the piece in the first place; starting with my question about the importance of hope to an ailing patient and ending someplace so different, as the… Continue Reading
Molto Agitato
Words are important to me. It’s part of my love of communication, mostly magnified by my ever-increasing commitment to writing. Writing and editing have demonstrated up-close and personal how crucial the right word is, and how words have the power to convey certain feelings, carry with them an aura of mood that is more precise… Continue Reading
Something the Social Worker Said…
Stamina; courage; there are so many words whose meanings I know, until I start to think about them three dimensionally. Then I find there’s much more to them than I ever realized. And just when I need them most, they float around in a taunting limbo. Language astronauts in a weightless environment, they won’t let… Continue Reading
Birthday Girl in a Boy’s Suit
How lucky Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are to have each other. One character uniquely different from the other, and possibly because of that difference, they enjoy a level of intimacy few friends find. As a child, I wondered if it was because they were boys. I also knew Mark Twain would have been, and… Continue Reading
The Mind’s Eye
‘Time marches on…’ my teacher would declare expansively, as if it was a revelation never shared before. ‘…so what have you done with yours?’ Experience taught me to expect that addendum, but seldom how to answer satisfactorily. Often caught staring out the window, it wasn’t hard to figure out I’d been daydreaming again. Escaping into… Continue Reading