After the Gold Rush… Black Friday?
We spent Thanksgiving up in 49er country and it was more than lovely, gathering together as families do from time to time, mingling love, dysfunction, football, excellent food, laughter and poker. The setting— a town that once boomed with gold strikes, saloons and brothels, a stone’s throw from the Empire Mine and its motherlode, now radiates quaint, small and quiet—a town without a single traff

Is weeping the new Botox?
Well, we’re in the official holiday season, and for many of us that means angst and despair peppered in with our joyous feelings of Norman Rockwell family life. As a therapist I have learned the value of feelings—and particularly as a male, it has been a steep and winding road from intellectualized repression to the freedom to surrender to raw and turbulent emotions.  As parents we ar

Give me liberty or give me lunch
When volunteering recently at my kids’ school I had occasion to take a highly informal poll of middle and high school students and thought I’d share my off-the-cuff Studs Terkel findings.  The question:  “If you could have your parents change one thing to make your life better, what would it be?” While not an exhaustive sampling of kids by any stretch, responses broke down into thre

Thanks
“If the only prayer you say in your whole life is ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.”  (Meister Eckhart, 13th-Century Dominican Mystic) So, thanks for reading. I have written many things:  eighteen as yet unproduced screenplays and one as yet unpublished self-help book—a seven year labor of love that will or won’t find its way in

The secret pain of the entitled child
On this week of giving thanks, I thought we might turn our attention to a certain sort of child who tends to try our patience:  the entitled child. Recently my wife was helping serve hot lunch at school when a high school girl asked if she could just “take a water.”  The bottled waters came with lunch if you bought it, and my wife explained that they had to serve everyone who