Over the past few weeks I have been cleaning out the small apartment my eighty-year old mother has been living in for ten years. She's moving to an even smaller place, the guest house behind my brother's house in Connecticut, where she will be surrounded by grandchildren, but where she...

Not long ago I opened my freezer and found, just to the left of the ice cubes, a container of frozen pasta sauce. This is not an unusual occurrence for me, an Italian cook adamantly opposed to wasting food, but this particular sauce happened to be special: I made it...

The surprising thing I've found in my recent experiment with internet dating -- (besides the fact that practically every available man in Staten Island, Northern New Jersey, and Western Long Island, but few in New York City, where I live, wants to date me) -- is how many men wish...