Supposedly, I don’t like shopping malls. I remember when we lived in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, in the seventies and we thought that it was a good Holiday Season if we hadn’t set foot at the Cherry Hill Mall. We much preferred shopping in the historical town of Haddonfield, with its boutiques, small gift shops […]
What’s in a Name?
I like to start the summer reading a great book that I’ve been saving for a special occasion. It was my treat for having finished the school year and turned in the grades on time. I have been retired now for over ten years and I still do it. It used to be some book […]
Florida With a Map
I have continued on my search to find a map of Florida, although now that I have several, I’m even more lost than with any GPS system. Not to ignore the early Paleo-Indian inhabitants of the peninsula, we know that Florida’s written history begins with the arrival of the Europeans. The Spaniard Juan Ponce de […]
Florida Without a Map
I have always loved maps; geography was one of my favorite subjects as a little girl growing up in Madrid. Perhaps I already knew that I would travel often and far. On maps one can mark the places visited or the ones planning to go. But I was in Florida without a map for an […]
Io Capitano: Redux
Manohla Dargis, a New York Times film critic, describes Io Capitano (Italy, 2023, directed by Matteo Garrone) as “A Migration Odyssey,” but it is so much more than that. It is a bildungsroman or a coming-of-age story; a depiction of the Noble Savage or the glorification of native peoples living in communion with nature; it […]
Sadie Hawkins Day
During my training into American traditions, I learned that when February had an extra day it was not only a leap year but it was also Sadie Hawkins Day. Sadie Hawkins was not an actual person; she first appeared in the comic strip Li’l Abner by Al Capp in 1937 in the fictional hillbilly village […]