Did you hear the one about the doctor who went fishing with his patient?

Neither had I, until a friend told us about a trip he'd taken with his doctor to go fly fishing. I wondered if he always went fishing with his doctor and he said, "No, if I...

B.B. (identifying details changed) sat at the kitchen table pushing her phone around like a piece on a game board. Waiting to find out whether or not she had to go visit her biological father for Father's Day, she sighed, grimaced, texted, and picked at food in which she had...

New Yorkers are not known to be easily shocked. They ride the subways and sit happily unperturbed between hookers and hedge fund managers. Barely dressed? Barely noticeable. Dressed to kill? Yawn.

So, how is it that almost every man and woman at a birthday party for a 13-year old girl...

You would think after the supposed millions of years we have been "evolving" or adapting that we would be as surprised by death as we are by eating and elimination. You would think that if it were just another natural process that it would be as shocking as summer following...

Love Lost in the USA: Can Science Find It?

In 1962 two kids were hiking along the crest of a mountain in the Hudson Valley when one of them takes out a knife and carves their initials into a tree. They were married 47 years. How did he know? How...

This appeared first in The New Paltz Times, The Woodstock Times, and The Poughkeepsie Times.

Initials on a Tree

It's 1962. My brother, Bill, is 19 and his new girlfriend, Cheryl, is just 17. They decided to go for a drive in his new yellow Opel with the fuzzy dice...

Since 2008, most of us have been walking budgetary tightropes -- cutting a piece off of this, snipping some off of that. For a significant percentage, it's been a steady slide into fiscal chaos, foreclosures, and fear. For some, it's just the luxuries that have been eliminated: No more the...

What's in a name.

Since 1935, when Dupont adopted the slogan "Better Living Through Chemistry," we have been a culture pummeled by polymers and overly impressed by the new and shiny. Their advertising not only changed how we thought about the rush of chemicals being delivered to us...

After the debate with my last articles on this topic, I find I couldn't agree with the critics more. Homeopathy is strange and sounds magical. When I try to explain it to people -- despite years of study and personal/professional experience -- I wind up sounding like my...

The American Sound Bite

Out of nowhere, my husband turned to me and said, "I wish you'd tell me what you do so I can tell other people. They ask me what you do and I can't explain it."

"I'm a psychotherapist and a consultant in classical homeopathy,"...

As a psychotherapist, it's always been important to help my clients feel as comfortable as possible. Typically the first interview can be awkward for new patients. It's understandable. They don't know me and may be unsure exactly what's expected. Sometimes they're not even clear as to why they're there except...

In our modern age, we've all been told that to find the real answers, we need to look "within." It's a message we see in magazines, hear over and over on television, and, of course, have thrust into our consciousness with the endless torrent of self-help books published every year....

I've had it. I give up. It's utterly impossible. I have more than 50, maybe even 100 different so-called "accounts" -- LinkedIn, The Huffington Post, Twitter, cable, phone, Internet, website administrator, Google, Yahoo -- the list has become a 10-page typewritten list of account names, numbers, passwords and pin numbers.

In "My Lost City," Fitzgerald wrote, "I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage." He was referring to the life and the loves that he and so many others had enjoyed in New York when it truly roared in the 1920s.

It was a giddy...

I've dreamt about farming all my life. You wouldn't know it by the way I live, but it's true. Somehow over all these years, my dreams and my realities have been separate by an inexplicable chasm.

I think for most people it is the same, or at least similar...

The other day I went into a store to buy some wine. I got three bottles and what I believe was an unprovoked sermon on detachment. I use the word "unprovoked" with deliberation.

I'd never met the man before and we were having a pleasant conversation. We were talking about...

Recently I found out that a beloved niece -- one with whom I lived until she was about two years old -- was pregnant. And suddenly, everything I had learned to let go of as she became a toddler, then again as a school-age child, then a teenager, then a...

Am I?

Yesterday I sat watching a storm tumble in as they can do only in this region of the country -- catapulting, cranky and fast. There were spiny shards of lightning, whipping sheets of rain you could see approach from a distance of 30-40 miles, and a thunder roll...

This story will strike some of you as the most absurd waste of a grown person's emotional life. For others, I imagine it will hit home. For me this is just a constant struggle, and it has been ever since I was a child. Today, it forced me to ask...

This is not a rhetorical question, though, according to my husband, it may be one that I come to regret asking in a public forum like this.

When I told him I was going to write an article about what happened in a gun shop the other day, he winced,...