“I like the monologue even more than the duet, when it is good. It’s like watching a man write a book expressly for you: he writes it, reads it aloud, acts it, revises…

“Where we live, in north-central Florida, patience is not a virtue but an absolute necessity. The community here, especially at such emporia as Hallmark, is largely in its late 70s and 80s, and…

“Usually, it takes decades for people to cross over from my present-tense, analog life, into my dreams . . . and nightmares. But Trump has jumped my blood-brain barrier in record time.”—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring…

“This past year, and over the entire course of the US presidential campaign, we have all borne witness, whether conscious, less conscious, or unconscious, to yet another dangerous dance with Wotan, with the…

“Most emotions, and perhaps all—and I posit there are thousands of them, shared to a greater or lesser degree by many sentient beings on this planet—have something in common: they depend on .…

“My ‘advice,’ the crone-wisdom of 2016, differs dramatically from what I had to impart, to say, as a young adult mother in 1987. For our world—that of my granddaughters and me—has morphed quickly…

“Floating through space on the wings of Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecrafts were, are, the so-called Pioneer plaques, humankind’s early-1970s ‘messages in a bottle’ to the universe. If and when they are ‘received,’…

“Those 28 moves have taken me from a subur­ban Californian home surrounded by poppies and bird-of-paradise plants to an apartment in Kolonaki with a Corinthian maid and a view of the Parthenon. Then,…

“Your only child, I am now seven years older than you were the day you died. (I marvel at children who, through one mishap or another, never meet their fathers, lost as men…

“But Verne seems not to have a similar ‘governor.’ And I believe men, especially young men, are genetically programmed to view, and treat, themselves as cannon fodder. Not only do they generally overestimate…