I came when I was in high school as part of a student exchange program with the Jewish Community Center in New Jersey, to Ramat Eliyahu. You come and volunteer for five weeks at a day camp. I was a teenager - I couldn't really appreciate it as much, ...
I explained I wanted to descend as quickly as possible to camp IV in order to warm myself and gather a supply of hot drink and oxygen in the event I might need to go back up the mountain to assist descending climbers.
For a moment David was tempted to think that perhaps there were no good people at all outside concentration camps, but then he reminded himself of the sailor and Angelo and the English people who might have been ignorant but were certainly not bad.
Palestine. For most of us, the word brings to mind a series of confused images and disjointed associations-massacres, refugee camps, UN resolutions, settlements, terrorist attacks, war, occupation, checkered kouffiyehs and suicide bombers, a seemingl...
Washington not only fit the bill physically, he was also almost perfect psychologically, so comfortable with his superiority that he felt no need to explain himself. (As a young man during the French and Indian war he had been more outspoken, but he ...
In front of us, the ocean stretched for eternity. Around us, reggae mussy floated through the air. In our drying clothes and still-damp hair, we ate junk food and talked. At some point we finished and went for a long walk in the sand. We picked up sh...
See, admit it, you need my help.” “Fine. I need you… your help.” My admission made Ace’s half smile bloom into a full one. He really was devastatingly handsome. And so very, very unattainable. “What makes you say that, Riles?” His thumb...
There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art science would be a...
A certain critic -- for such men, I regret to say, do exist -- made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained 'all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.' He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who mad...
Flame is not the only fire.” Her tone turned almost stern. “You have brought your folk another spark far greater than any flame. You have opened their eyes to the world, Aljan, shown them lands and peoples formerly beyond their ken. You have whis...
There is a fearful moment of reckoning before us should it ever chance that when all our trees shall have been sacrificed on the altar of the patron-fiend of news, the newspaper supply shall suddenly be cut off and we find ourselves some fine morning...
The summer,' Randy explained. 'I'm going to appreciate it. I'm going to walk in the woods noticing everything, and ride my bike on all the roads I never explored. I'm going to fill a pillow with ladies' tobacco so I can smell it in January and rememb...
After visiting these two places (Berchtesgaden and the Eagle's lair on Obersalzberg) you can easily see how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He ha...
We knew she [Sylvia] was unusual, because of the seriousness with which she was treated, the lofty importance of her job as guest managing editor, and because she was kept fast at her desk when the rest of us were allowed to fool around….I remember...
Sylvia rarely flattered the men in her life- she envied them. She was far more likely to compete with a man than a woman. In her journal she describes this jealousy of which she is painfully aware; "It is an envy born of the desire to be active and d...
When it's summer, people sit a lot. Or lie. Lie in the sense of recumbency. A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic. Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to ...
Girl at Interview: Have I seen you before? Tom: Me? I don't think so. Girl at Interview: Do you ever go to Angela's Plaza? Tom: Yes... That's like my favorite spot in the city. Girl at Interview: Yeah, except for the parking lots. Tom: Yeah, yeah I a...
Holy sea turtles!" - Arabella Valli, The Equinox (Book Two of the Summer Solstice Series)
As the days went by, my frustration festered like an outhouse during a Jamaican summer.
Summer will end soon enough, and childhood as well.
Teachers are not glorified babysitters with summers off. Their profession fuels all others, and on a normal day that is amazing enough in and of itself.
