Category: family

  • The Color of Cancer: Time for a Change

    The Color of Cancer: Time for a Change

    Black lifespans in NYC are 7 years shorter than white are, and many are cut short by cancer. Policy could change that.

  • Love of the Irish: St. Patrick’s Day Reflections

    A Personal St. Patrick’s Day Planning Cycle St. Patrick’s Day Plan 1. The most obvious plan is to drink. I am part Irish according to ancestry.com, a lot of people in the town (hamlet, really) where I grew up in were Irish, including my first boyfriend. And I always have a Guinness on St. Patrick’s…

  • How Not to Die of Lung Cancer

    Quitting smoking is only part of the solution. The day we found out my father had lung cancer, a neighbor had come by my childhood home upstate, but no one answered the door. The neighbor went on inside and looked around – none of us locked our doors out there in the country at the…

  • Good Neighbors

    A Christmas Story, excerpt from Death and the Dream. After Christmas my Aunt Muriel and I walk through the barren park on East Fifth Street in New York. It’s not much of a park. We have to stop every six feet or so beside one of the rotting wooden benches to let my Aunt Muriel…

  • Veterans and my novel, Brindle 24

    Veterans and my novel, Brindle 24

    Norman Brown, the author’s father was a veteran of WW2.