Lori Duff Writes
I am 50 years old and I have owned a grand total of four cars in my life. The first was a 1985 Oldsmobile Delta 88 with a hood the size of a regulation basketball court. It was basically two sofas on wheels. I bought it from my grandfather when I started law school and…
“Well we all have a face that we hide away forever. And we take them out and show ourselves when everyone has gone.” ~ Billy Joel “The Stranger” “What I am is what I am. Are you what you are or what?” ~ Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians “What I Am” We all have…
I probably ought to be more afraid of Big Brother, but the truth is that my life is a little too boring for me to get all worked up about who is looking at the details. I go to work, I go home, I go to networking events, and I occasionally go out to dinner…
My children tell me I’m rude, but they’ll forgive me because I’m old. I’m rude, they say because I insist on punctuation in texts. I agree I’m rude, but I think it’s for other reasons. These are the same children who will articulate their punctuation when they speak, as in, “Are we going out to…
Firefly is a small book of poems by Ellen Austin-Li that I assume is autobiographical, though it may be entirely fictional. The fact that I cannot tell is a testament to the skill of the author and the burning reality of the feelings in the poems. Though each of the poems stands on its own…
My Dad is just now winding up what he is calling his Farewell Tour. “Yeah, yeah.” said my son. “Cher had five of those.” He is making an up and down road trip of the east coast, visiting friends and relatives he hasn’t seen in years. When he gets home, he may never leave again. …
Departure, by Joseph Reid, the third book in the Seth Walker series, is a non-stop thrill ride. That sounds like a cliché, I know. I wracked my brains to come up with an original way to say “non-stop thrill ride” and came up short. What can I say? That’s what Departure is: a non-stop thrill…
“Think before you speak.” Is there anyone – anyone? – who will doubt the wisdom of this old saw? I’m going to go with “no.” I mean, “speak before you think” makes no sense. “Go ahead and spout any old garbage before you’ve given it any thought whatsoever” seems like foolish advice. Now that…
I’m more fortunate than a lot of people, I suppose, in that during coronapocalypse my industry, the law, has been considered an essential one and we never really shut down. Things shifted to Zoom and WebEx. We discovered that a lot of those meetings that we suspected could have been emails really could have been…
I happen to have been born in a Jubilee Year. A Jubilee Year is a biblical thing, specifically Leviticus 25:8-13, and although it is a fairly complicated concept, it can be summed up as a Super-Sabbath of a year. It’s the year after the 7th times 7th year. The 50th year. You rest your cropland…