Sometimes, when I was very young, my mother made me cringe with embarrassment. For example, on the few occasions when she and Aunt Rose...

In Part 1, we examined the art of cultivating guilt, a necessary ingredient for the NJM. However, before we proceed with Part 2, I would...

In dealing with parents, specifically mothers, you often have to either laugh or be upset, and frankly, being upset is bad for the...

You may have noticed when I write about famine times I use the phrase “not having two cents to rub together.” It’s an idiom for being...

Years pass, affection turns to loathing, and the former bride and groom agree to stay together for the sake of the children until the...

For most people, weddings are a big deal, I mean a really big deal. My weddings? Not so much. To get the full picture, you need a little...

Saying that someone was funny is no good; you’ve got to give examples. The problem with my mother’s examples is they were only funny to...

Recently, I had the honor of attending a Gujarati film screening at a large Hindu Temple. I’d never been there before so I figured it...

I’ve been given the task of identifying bodies of the deceased four times in my life so far. There’s nothing funny about death and...

Maybe you’ve read the story of Mary, my Amah. If not, Mary was the housekeeper-babysitter who took care of my sister and me for years,...

Some families attach nicknames to their kin that are not very kind, such as Rat Face and Lard Ass. We never did that. Instead, we...

The chicken business had gone bankrupt, the Vegas gambling tables had cost him his few remaining dollars, and the strain of it all gave...

Since we’ve been on the subject of my mother recently, I’d like to take this opportunity to set the record straight about how she came to...

After my parents decided to sell their chicken ranch in the San Fernando Valley, they ran a chicken store on Temple Street near Boyle...

People have told me I can’t really remember things that happened when I was two. People are wrong. I can remember all the way back to the...

One of my mother’s family members was actually well off. He opened a shoe store, and then a second one, and before long he had 500 shoe...

My father would become enraptured with a new interest, participate in it every weekend for a year or two, then tire of it and move onto a...

In an earlier post, I said my family didn’t go camping. That’s not exactly accurate. They went camping; they just never went with me. ...

Echo Park Avenue used to have a red car trolley line running from Sunset Boulevard all the way up to Grandma’s house. Past her house, the...

An earlier journal entry ended by saying my children froze in fear when I told them I’d started meditating again. That wasn’t entirely...