My father, Samuel Holliday, had deep-set blue eyes that were the kind that threw you off. You never knew what he was thinking. Statistically only 8 percent of the world’s population has blue eyes, and it is believed that all blue-eyed people have one common European ancestor. These rarities fit well with the mercurial and […]

My understanding of inheritance has evolved over the last few years. This evolution began in July 2017 when I lost my mom and confidante to cancer. Soon after, my dear dad passed away, in November 2018. If that was not enough, I also lost my brother suddenly, on Jan. 1, 2020. With my recent life […]

As an anthropologist, I am keenly aware that there are at least two different kinds of inheritance: biological and cultural. I inherited my strawberry-blond hair and blue eyes from my WASP-y ancestors who came from Scandinavia and Great Britain. My younger son inherited these same traits from me, along with my allergy to penicillin (poor […]

On April 17, my mom, Rhoda Schneider, 97 years old, passed away due to COVID-19. She had been living in an assisted living center in Michigan near my youngest sister. It has been very surreal as I could not fly out to visit her when she first got sick and we had a Zoom funeral […]

On a dismal, sleeting January morning, “the Ice Storm of ’98” had set in. My husband, 10-month-old son and I had moved to my parents’ home, since our own house, which depended upon electricity, oil and hot water radiators, was cold. At my parents’ house there was no power, no phone service or running water, […]

We four had to sneak into town. We’d left Maine on a Friday in mid-March in my oversized gray Chevy van with its twin beds in the back. We arrived in western Pennsylvania at my aunt’s in the wee hours of the morning. The next day was the surprise celebration of my parents’ 50th wedding […]

Hero worship is an idea that now seems limited to important people who do extraordinary things, like Michelle Obama, Gov. Cuomo or Justice Sonya Sotomayor. I am now almost 60 and I have almost forgotten that hero worship when you are young is different: bigger, attainable, a tangible thing. I am 11 years younger than […]

It was a hot summer day back in the early ’60s and I was a scrawny 7-year-old in my red sneakers and one-piece sunsuit. I was swinging on our swing set just to feel a breeze. I swung high and when I came back down, Dad had pulled up in front of the house in […]

Loved to shift the “four-on the-floor” when I was around 6, adored perching fearlessly high on the seat of a John Deere at maybe 8, and jumped at the chance (without permission and illegally) to tool around town in my dad’s ’37 Plymouth while he was at church. I was 12. Didn’t get far, hooked […]