I watched a Princess Cruise host teach a group of 8-year-olds how to make a shark tooth necklace all the while talking about their teeth and those of the scary elasmobranch. They were enthralled. Hooray for science on the high seas!

The pool has dried up, and the fish is in trouble. South African Proverb Fish indeed are in trouble and so are elasmobranchs—the fancy scientific word for sharks. According to SaveAnimalsFacingExtinction.org, 11,417 sharks are killed every hour. Shark finning (clipping the fin off a small shark for shark fin soup, then dumping the fatally […]

Published in: To Oldly Go: Tales of Adventurous Travel by the Over-60s On: November 2015 When I hit sixty, my eldest daughter said, “Sixty is the new forty.” These words spawned in me a wanderlust the likes of which I couldn’t believe, and weeks after my birthday I challenged myself to go alone to Antarctica. After cavorting with […]

“You must give him twenty-five rupees to guard your shoes while you view the Avukana Buddha. You can pay for my shoes as well.” “But, Shirly, there’s no one visiting the Buddha but you and me, and that young fellow far off with the umbrella.” I sputtered under the thick drizzle. My protest that only […]

Jarred by the 13 or more Sherpa deaths in Mt. Everest avalanches in April 2014 and the over 40 trekkers perishing during the following October, I made a pilgrimage to the Annapurnas in central Nepal to ask why. Why this sudden change, why so many family catastrophes in one year? Sherpa is a family name […]

Travelers these days often meet with “unseasonal” rains, floods, drought, hurricanes, animal migrations, and more as we move about the globe. Sudden stories abound about dramas of climate change affecting creatures with whom we share this planet.

Leading Nepalese newspaper REPUBLICA has published an article written by my travel writers collective after our recent trip to Bandipur, Nepal. From REPUBLICA: “‘Come back, come back! The Inn is here!” Ram, Innkeeper of The Old Inn, chases after me in the fog. He has been waiting for me with hot chia, crisp pakoras, and a […]

GEM of Egypt is a novel about a Polish family caught up in the first wave of Eastern European immigrants to America in the late 1800s. Spanning four generations of the Golek family, the story relates the tragedies and hardships they face daily from crossing the inhospitable Atlantic to deadly work in the coalfields of the eastern United States. In New York and Chicago, and in quiet hamlets of Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley coal country, the Goleks endure and overcome the searing changes among the stripped-mined land of Eastern Ohio. Their belief in equal justice, family loyalty, and education for all birthed movements such as the United Mine Workers Union and worker rights.

“I am the only Greek in my family.The fishing net draped across the front entry adds a definitive new leitmotif to my San Francisco Edwardian home. The building has a blue-tinged white luster much like the structures that cling to the angular precipices of Greece’s southern Peloponnese area of Lakonia. According to Greek lore, the fishing net, having survived the washings of forty different currents, is so pure and clear it will bless my home and guard against evil. You see, I’ve just returned from Greece and have discovered my true Greek ancestry. 


A lover’s quarrel, we all have had at least one of these. We live with and on Planet Earth. We intimately affect its system every present moment. Humans rattle the planet a thousand times more critically than the animals and plants with whom we share the terra firma. Our effects often have long-term ramifications on all living creatures. We’re not sure of the long-term effects of all the changes we see and feel.