My awkward pre-teen and early teen years were spent at Gray Avenue Elementary, grades six through eight, which no one referred to as middle school in 1959 to 1962, or even into the later sixties in our small California Central Valley town. (Photo: me at 13, before 8th grade graduation dance, with my mom. I wasn't happy about what the [...]

(Photo is insecure Francine at 12) During the time I was taking piano lessons while practicing at neighbors’ homes (mid-to-late 1950‘s; see prior post), I was also trying to orchestrate little shows that I and the kids on our block might eventually put on for our parents and other children. I was partly inspired by the shows the children put [...]

Kindergarten, I'm far left second row My mother had a pretty voice and sang to me when I was a toddler. My dad whistled all the time, often “Anchors Aweigh”—he’d been in the US Navy in World War II—and had good pitch and a cheerful disposition. His father called him “The Canary.” We also had a record player [...]

Here’s my last, and long, post about our trip in September 2025. In Scotland, they call a meandering lazy drive a “dauner.” We set off on one of those on our Sunday in Edinburgh, and it was a gorgeous sunny clear (and cool) day. We’d been braving a bit of rain now and then on our entire trip, and Edinburgh [...]

After gypsy jazz the night before in Paris, it was a bit of a challenge to get to Charles de Gaulle airport by 8:00am on a Wednesday morning in late September. Air France is not my favorite airline, but they got us to Auld Reekie (Old Smoky, Edinburgh’s nickname from the days when peat and coal fires filled the air [...]

Richard’s cousin Katherine had told us about a walkway Paris had installed atop a no longer used elevated railway, so we decided to check it out on a Sunday afternoon. It’s called Le Coulee Vert, the green gully. That’s a little odd because it’s way up in the air, but that’s the translation we kept getting when we looked it [...]

After a very full day with Richard’s cousins, on the next day, we slept in, barely made it to our hotel’s (expensive but delicious buffet) breakfast, worked out in the pool, and got a late start on gadding about. We moseyed over to Les Deux Magots (The Two Flies, as in, two flies on the wall discussing “don’t you wish [...]

On our seventh day in Paris, Richard’s cousins (and we’re talking distant, like about 4th or 5th cousins) had come to see us. They live in a village in eastern France about an hour’s drive from Strasbourg, the farthest east French city, right near the German border. Bernard and Eliane took the train, which is about a three or four [...]