About Random Musings
Bio
I was born in 1940, in Plainfield, New Jersey, and grew up there. I went to Muhlenberg College and then to graduate school at Emory in Atlanta where I got a PhD in Comparative Literature. I lived in France and Switzerland, first as a student and then directing a Junior Year Abroad Program. Then I seriously settled down and taught at Friends Seminary in Manhattan from the age of 29 until my retirement. When I was forty-four, I took in Tammy, a four-year-old who had had a rough life in the foster care system She is still with me along with her twenty-five-year-old son, Paul, and his wife, Charlotte. When he was two years old, we moved to Cape Coral, Florida. The summer of my seventieth year I got married (for the first time) to Don Routh. We had been married for 11 years when he died at the age of 84. His greatest gift to me was a wonderful step daughter, Lauri, who lives in Iowa.
Now
Paul met his Australian wife online when they were both 14 and avid Minecraft players. We eventually took a trip to Australia, as I took the old-fashioned position that you should meet someone in person before you make them your life partner. Life partners they have become. We went through the challenge of massive damage to our home during hurricane Ian, but survived along with our charming Pitbull, Blueberry. We are a three-generation family of four living together. Blueberry is in charge.
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Publications
I wrote a memoir about raising and adopting Tammy. I then got caught up in a project of reading as many books as I could by authors who had either attended Friends Seminary or taught there. I have read and commented on more than 200 works by Friends authors. Now I am adding one more work of my own to the list. It is the adaptation of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner into a musical play. I had been looking for a play to put on for Earth Day. It occurred to me that the story of the mariner, who kills the beautiful albatross and then suffers the consequences by having it hang around his neck, would be a perfect emblem of the need to be kind to nature.
