Dad died on Wednesday, March 28, 2018. It’s done. The long-awaited end, which we like to think of as the perfect end. Surrounded by family, not in pain, awaiting his death and departing the brief life of an invalid. He wasn’t going to let that last long. He told us […]
I’m back from another weekend visit to sickbay in Blawenburg, where my poor dad continues to struggle with his declining health and the impending end of his long life. Nat Hartshorne is the last remaining brother, and many people I know have told me they are not ready to accept […]
My father has always worn this ring. It’s a gold version of the Hartshorne family crest, and it was made for all of dad’s brothers and for him when he was in high school. My dad rarely, if ever, took this ring off. Once he lost the ring, and it […]
We arrived in Waterville Valley, New Hampshire on a Sunday afternoon and it began snowing. A perfect event for our day of skiing with Tim Smith, the GM of this impressive operation that includes an entire village, a school, a big mountain all surrounded by the White Mountain National Park. […]
I’ve been quite consumed with a huge transition taking place in my family. Our patriarch, Nat Hartshorne, is in hospice and battling lymphoma, and we’ve been visiting and calling and trying to imagine our lives without Bumpy, who has done so much to make each one of us proud, and […]
It’s a Saturday morning in February and the beginning of Mary’s week-long school vacation. So even though it’s 10:45, I’ll let her sleep in, as she warned me she would want to do. No worries. I am doing favorite Saturday morning puttering, getting the mail, making the grocery lists and […]
I’ve been talking up a new product I found at Whole Foods, that I had read about perhaps two years ago in Wired Magazine. It’s a new hamburger made from plants that truly tastes exactly like a regular beef hamburger. It’s incredible, you expect it to taste the way most […]
Carl Fowler is a railroad man. It’s in his blood and a proud part of his family history. He says that expecting billion dollar rail projects in 2018 is going to take too long. That we all should be working hard and advocating for regional rail. Slower railcars, like the […]
The most exciting transit development in years was marred by three fatalities when the new Brightline Train service between Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach commenced in January and two people immediately tried to cross the tracks and were struck by the high-speed trains. As of 2018, it’s called Virgin Trains […]
I made my way to the far south part of Manhattan to Little Italy, past Chinatown’s stores to a restaurant called Margherita NYC. Inside, Sicilian chef Giuseppe Costa, who runs restaurant il Baviglino in Palermo.was preparing a four-course feast. The evening was a bit awkward, if only because of the […]
I have been feeling the effects of cancer treatment and now understand precisely what it must have felt like for my old friend Kent when he got sick. Kent used to be a prolific poster. He would never go a day without a blog post, but as he endured a […]
Life moves on and people pass away. I remember when we had our old cat, Mama Cat, thinking about how I would feel when she finally died. She was born in 2000 and died just a few months ago, 17 long years of a good life. I thought about what […]