I wrote and published this item on Facebook on July 21, 2009, when the 40th anniversary of the first landing on the moon was triggering numerous reminiscences. The incident described here is a unique, if little-heralded, footnote to this landmark event in the history of the human species. All the attention to the 40th anniversary of the […]
The following are some thoughts I was invited to write about “national service” – in view of my having served in the Peace Corps and the U.S. Foreign Service – for inclusion in the Class Book of the Yale University Class of 1966, in preparation for our 50th reunion next weekend (June 3-5, 2016): Don’t […]
My last Foreign Service overseas assignment was to Japan in 1985. This was no ordinary assignment to our embassy in Tokyo or one of the U.S. consulates around the country. No, this assignment was to the U.S. Pavilion at an international exposition, Tsukuba Expo ’85 (http://bit.ly/1RweFds), held that summer in Tsukuba Science City, 35 miles […]
Bank Bridge over the Griboyedov Canal, one of many canals in St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), sometimes called “the Venice of the North.” As a young Foreign Service officer, I arrived in Leningrad in early July 1976 to begin a two-year assignment at the U.S. consulate-general in that city, the second-largest in the USSR. I flew […]
The following incident took place one evening in 1972 in our apartment, when I was working in my first Foreign Service post at the U.S. embassy in Brasilia. My wife (clarification: my “starter wife,” as a funny friend likes to call a first spouse to whom one is no longer wed) had gone to bed […]
Lyrics that I dreamed up for the benefit of our kids at Christmastime 1977 when I was working at the U.S. consulate-general in Leningrad, USSR. We had just washed our (very dirty) blue Saab. These lyrics were originally published in the Neva Neva News, the occasional newsletter of the consulate-general staff. Sung to the tune of the […]
