What scares you? Spiders? Snakes? Heights? Public speaking? Death? Congress? I am fascinated with phobias which, my dictionary says, are “an intense and persistent fear of certain situations, activities, things, animals, or people.” What makes the fear a phobia is the “excessive and ...

Take an afternoon drive around an urban or suburban area anywhere in the Midwest. Look at the houses. What is missing from these homes that would likely have been there 50 years ago? Give up? How about a television antenna? Fifty years ago you would have found a television antenna on most ...

When I learned to read I quickly became a little nerd, reading anything I could get my hands on. It’s amazing what a kid can learn by reading, especially when he finds stuff he shouldn’t be reading. While I have learned a great deal from reading, I’ve learned even more from listening ...

The best formal education of my life came through two professors at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, when I was doing master’s work in creative writing and acting. Anne Greene and John Hawkins released me from the kind of secondary education boundaries created by the ...

Growing up in rural Iowa in the ’50s and ’60s I was not exposed to much diversity. Our small-town schools in those days were nearly all white. In kindergarten and first grade I had a classmate from England. Other than her accent, which I thought was cute, she was like the rest of us ...

Okay, I’m a senior citizen now and I’m mature enough to admit to my faults. My jaws crack noisily when I eat apples and I snarf down popcorn too quickly. I bore my family by repeating jokes and personal anecdotes and my Dutch stubbornness and German temper sometimes get in the way of human ...