Cleaning the Paths in Hanson Park

Cleaning the Paths in Hanson Park

Estimated reading time: 0 minutes, 49 seconds

Today, I had the privilege of participating in a challenging cleanup at Hanson Park, a task necessary due to the floods caused by the winter season. The path closest to the Rahway River, which goes by one of my wife’s memorial benches, was covered with several inches to a foot or more of silt and leaves, making walking extremely hazardous. But, with the invaluable contributions of volunteers, we cleared the path and added five cubic yards of stone to make it safer. A local contractor also played a crucial role, generously donating his time and backhoe. Volunteers from the fire and police departments and my fellow community members also came forward to help.

Despite all the assistance, my seventy-five-year-old body is feeling the strain. Nevertheless, I’m grateful to live in Downtown Cranford, a community that’s easy to walk around, with many friends and opportunities to volunteer. My friends in the Conservancy refer to me as ‘a tremendous supporter and cheerleader for Hanson Park.’

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Jan's Love Never Dies!

Estimated reading time: 0 minutes, 49 seconds

Jan’s Love Never Dies!

Yesterday was memorable for Temple Sha'arey Shalom as we held a Mitzvah Day at Hanson Park. Being a small congregation, we opened the park to volunteers from the community. When I arrived at the park around noon, I saw a mother in her thirties playing with her children. She was having a good time with her kids when she noticed we were cleaning the park. She immediately offered to lend a hand and volunteered to help.

Resizing for My New Life!

Estimated reading time: 0 minutes, 49 seconds

Resizing for My New Life!

I am centered in overlapping communities where I can walk daily and live interdependently with my neighbors.

I will forever be grateful that Jan and I moved here, as living in supportive communities has been critical in managing my grief.

Jan's love transformed me the day we met. Her love continues to shower me with her undying support and allows me to live fully, albeit alone, in Apartment 3B!

Jan’s Memorial Garden

Estimated reading time: 0 minutes, 49 seconds

Jan’s Memorial Garden

Working with the Hanson Park Conservancy, we have taken significant steps in building Jan's Memorial Triangle Garden at Hanson Park including installing the Wind Sculpture.

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Cleaning the Paths in Hanson Park
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The Pull of the Stars

Read: June 2022

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The Pull of the Stars

by Emma Donoghue

After Jan’s death and over two years of COVID, The Pull of the Stars might not seem like a good read for me. But I had placed this book on my to-read list a few months ago.  The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue is set in 1918 in Dublin; a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu is a small world of work, risk, death, and unlooked-for love. It was a page-turner that engrossed me at that moment. When I reached the last page, I wanted the story to continue. 

The details about childbirth, life, and death were riveting. All three of the main characters are ones that I could have imagined in an episode of Call the Midwife. That Dr. Lynn was a natural person underscores the depth of Ms. Donoghue’s research and writing skills. 

Julie and Bridie’s characters were so real it was difficult to believe that they were not also based on natural persons. 

I strongly recommend The Pull of the Stars.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview.

In an Ireland ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia’s regimented world step two outsiders—Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a rumored Rebel on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney.

With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers somehow do their impossible work. In the darkness and intensity of this minor ward, these women change each other’s lives in unexpected ways over three days. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic but shepherd new life into a fearful world.

In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic of hope and survival against all odds.


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The Pursuit of Happiness

Read: January 2025

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The Pursuit of Happiness

by Jeffrey Rosen

Today, I started reading Jeffrey Rosen‘s book, “The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders.” This New York Times bestseller examines what “the pursuit of happiness” meant to our nation’s Founders, how that iconic phrase influenced their lives, and how it provided the foundation for our democracy—a quest for being good rather than merely feeling good.

The Declaration of Independence identifies “the pursuit of happiness” as one of our unalienable rights, alongside life and liberty. Jeffrey Rosen, president of the National Constitution Center, profiles six of the most influential Founding Fathers—Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton—to explore what pursuing happiness meant to them. This work provides “the best and most readable introduction to the ideas of the Founders that we have” (Gordon Wood, author of “Power and Liberty“).

By examining the classical Greek and Roman moral philosophers who inspired the Founders, Rosen illustrates how they understood the pursuit of happiness as a quest for being good rather than simply feeling good. It is about striving for lifelong virtue instead of seeking short-term pleasures. Among these virtues were the habits of industry, temperance, moderation, and sincerity, which the Founders regarded as essential components of personal growth, character development, and self-mastery. They believed that self-governance in politics required self-governance on an individual level. For all six Founders, the pursuit of virtue was fundamentally incompatible with the enslavement of African Americans, although the Virginians failed to uphold their principles in this regard.

Ken Burns describes “The Pursuit of Happiness” as “immensely readable and thoughtful. It is more than just an analysis of the famous phrase in the Declaration. It is a revealing journey into the Founders’ minds, offering a deep and fresh understanding of the foundations of our democracy.



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North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther

Read: October 2025

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North Sun: A Novel

by Ethan Rutherford

North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther” by Ethan Rutherford is a finalist for the fiction category of the 2025 National Book Award. With one foot firmly planted in the traditional sea-voyage narrative, and another in a blazing mythos of its own, this debut novel looks unsparingly at the cost of environmental exploitation and predation, and in doing so feverishly sings not only of the past, but to the present and future as well.

Setting out from New Bedford in 1878, the crew of the Esther is confident the sea will be theirs: in addition to cruising the Pacific for whales, they intend to hunt the teeming northern grounds before the ice closes. But as they sail to their final destination in the Chukchi Sea, where their captain Arnold Lovejoy has an urgent directive of his own to attend to, their encounters with the natural world become more brutal, harrowing, ghostly, and strange.


Ethan Rutherford‘s fiction has appeared in BOMB, Tin House, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, and The Best American Short Stories. He is the author of two story collections–Farthest South (Deep Vellum, 2020) and The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories (Ecco, 2013)–and for these works has been named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, a finalist for the John Leonard Prize and CLMP’s Firecracker Award, received honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and was the winner of a Minnesota Book Award.

Born in Seattle, Washington, he received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and now teaches Creative Writing at Trinity College. He lives in Hartford, Connecticut, with his wife and two children.



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Flashlight

Read: August 2025

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Flashlight: A Novel

by Susan Choi

A monumental new novel by National Book Award winner Susan Choi, Flashlight spans decades and continents in a captivating and emotional exploration of family, loss, memory, and the ways we are influenced by what remains hidden. Longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, the novel follows the journey of a father’s disappearance over time, across nations, and within the realm of memory. This work comes from the author of Trust Exercise.

On a summer night, Louisa and her father take a walk along the breakwater. Her father is carrying a flashlight, but he cannot swim. Later, Louisa is found on the beach, soaked to the skin and barely alive. Her father is missing. She is only ten years old.

Louisa is the only child of parents who have distanced themselves from their pasts. Her father, Serk, is Korean but was born and raised in Japan. He lost touch with his family after they embraced the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to North Korea. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her Midwestern family due to a reckless adventure in her youth. Then there’s Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose unexpected return will have profound consequences.

For now, it is just Anne and Louisa—Louisa and Anne—adrift and facing the challenges of everyday life in the aftermath of their immense loss. Bound together yet estranged, they struggle to cope with their shared grief and attempt to move forward. However, they cannot escape the haunting memories of that fateful night. What happened to Louisa’s father?

With shifting perspectives across time and character, and repeatedly revisiting that night by the sea, Flashlight explores the shockwaves of one family’s tragedy while also engaging with the invisible currents of history.


Susan Choi is the author of Trust Exercise, which won the National Book Award for fiction. She has also written the novels The Foreign Student, American Woman, A Person of Interest, and My Education.

Choi has received several prestigious awards, including the Asian American Literary Award for fiction, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award. Additionally, she has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Currently, she teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and resides in Brooklyn, New York.



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The Book of V

Read: October 2021

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The Book of V

by Anna Solomon

The Book of V by Anna Solomon is a book that I may not have read at another time in my life, and I did find it to be a book that I could not stop reading.

Goodreads summarizes its plot.

Anna Solomon’s kaleidoscopic novel intertwines the lives of a Brooklyn mother in 2016, a senator’s wife in 1970s Washington, D.C., and the Bible’s Queen Esther, whose stories of sex, power and desire overlap and ultimately converge—showing how women’s roles have and have not changed over thousands of years.

Being Jewish, I knew the story of Queen Esther, although this version added new layers of the story that I did not know. The book’s illumination that women’s roles have not changed over thousands of years was something I knew but did not fully understand.

The three characters are very vivid and weave a story that is worth reading.

Lily is a mother and a daughter. And a second wife. And a writer, maybe? Or she was going to be, before she had children. Now, in her rented Brooklyn apartment, she’s grappling with her sexual and intellectual desires while also trying to manage her roles as a mother and a wife.

Vivian Barr seems to be the perfect political wife, dedicated to helping her charismatic and ambitious husband find success in Watergate-era Washington D.C. But one night he demands a humiliating favor, and her refusal to obey changes the course of her life—along with the lives of others.

Esther is a fiercely independent young woman in ancient Persia, where she and her uncle’s tribe live a tenuous existence outside the palace walls. When an innocent mistake results in devastating consequences for her people, she is offered up as a sacrifice to please the king, in the hopes that she will save them all.

I recommend this book.

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The Payback: A Novel

Read: July 2025

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The Payback: A Novel

by Kashana Cauley

In “The Payback: A Novel,” Kashana Cauley delivers a witty and incisive examination of race, power, and the everyday struggles we all face. The story follows Jada Williams, who finds herself on the run from the relentless Debt Police. As she grapples with her daunting student loans, she teams up with two quirky coworkers from the mall who offer their unexpected support on a plan to exact revenge by erasing their student loan debt.

With sharp humor and captivating storytelling, Cauley highlights the complex web of financial struggles, making readers laugh while also encouraging thoughtful reflection.

Jada Williams has a talent for judging people by their appearance. From across the mall, she can determine not only someone’s inseam and pant size but also the exact style they need to transform their lives. Unfortunately, she is no longer using this superpower as a wardrobe designer for Hollywood stars; instead, she is earning minimum wage plus commission at the Glendale mall.

When Jada is fired yet again, she must outrun the newly instated Debt Police, who are pursuing her relentlessly. However, Jada, like any great antihero, isn’t going to wait for the authorities to come after her. With the help of two other debt-burdened coworkers at the mall, she devises a plan for revenge. Together, the three women formulate a plan to erase their student loans forever and exact revenge on the system that promised them everything and then tried to take it all back.

The Payback is a razor-sharp and hilarious examination of race, power, and the daily grind, from one of the most original and exciting writers working today.


Kashana Cauley is the author of The Payback and The Survivalists, which was named a best book of 2023 by the BBC, Today, Vogue, and more. Cauley is also a television writer, having worked on The Great North, Pod Save America on HBO, and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and other notable publications. Find out more at KashanaCauley.com.



When you purchase a book through one of my links, I earn a small commission that helps support my passion for reading. This contribution allows me to buy even more books to share with you, creating an incredible cycle of discovering great reads together! Your support truly makes a difference!

Enjoy a limited-time offer of 20% off your next book purchase at Bookshop.org!


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