Selected Essays from
Twenty reflections on life, memory, family, and the human experience.
'Paula, I will be there when you fall. I will be there when you rise'
October 19, 2019
Dear Paula: My memory of the exact moment you fell is not wholly clear.
What I remember is we were coming down off the mountain. It wasn't even a big mountain. At 1,642 feet Monument Mountain is officially a hill. A mountain must be at least 2,000 feet high. I was walking ahead of you, two or three steps ahead. I think I heard you call out my name, but I wouldn't swear to it. Something did make me turn around. Was it your voice? .....
Tattoos and gardens — marking the time in lines on our skin and soil
October 12, 2021
I’m building a vegetable garden. No, that’s not true. I’m paying someone to build a vegetable garden for me.
I’ll plant the seeds and I’ll pull the weeds once the soil is ready and a fence is installed to keep out the deer. But two young people, a man and woman half my age, will do the labor of preparing the ground for the fresh corn and cucumbers I’ll enjoy next summer. .....
From baby steps to the stars, stories help us get there
November 23, 2021
A half moon hangs outside my window. The treetops are black on the horizon, and the sky is the color of the dark blue sea. The light of the moon illuminates my fields, but all that I see are shadows. The evening landscape is lovely. It comforts me to know that within my line of sight everything seems at peace.
In the morning, I put on the news. That was a mistake. Then I read the paper — mistake number two. Then I think, what will it take to really ruin my day, to create a trifecta of .....
I've seen my son struggle, but now I see him chasing his dreams. That's my dream come true
August 16, 2022
A dinner. A party. A concert. A show. A hike. A museum. A girl. A boy. A knife. A dream.
The boy is my eldest son, Gabriel. He’s a construction worker in Florida, where he has lived for nearly two years. Much of his life has been fraught with emotional turmoil leading to drug and alcohol abuse. Today, he is clean, he is in love and doing the best he can to manage a complicated world......
The time I got hit by a car reminds me how much I prefer cycling outside
December 20, 2022
With eight inches of snow on the ground and more to come in a few days, it’s not very likely that my bicycle wheels will be on the road anytime soon.
That makes me sad even though I can still ride indoors on my trainer. Riding indoors is safe, but not much fun. True, no one has every been hit by a car riding a bicycle in their basement, but the view is not the same. My basement, for example, lacks blue skies, green trees, .....
An autumn ride through the countryside offers a connection with nature's residents
October 10, 2023
Four deer. A really big snake. Twenty or so wild turkeys. A snapping turtle. Many cows. A half-dozen horses. A whole bunch of llamas. A great blue heron. Not a visit to the local petting zoo, but a 24-mile bike ride with my friend Helene.
We often see animals on our rides because we live in an area where animals flourish. Deer are the most common, but I have also seen porcupines, beavers, foxes, .....
The lessons I learned from the three ex-felons at my dinner table
October 24, 2023
There are times when it’s hard to know where to begin or where to end, when the memory of the things that bring joy to our lives is overwhelmed by an onslaught of sadness. The incomprehensible is real, and the light at the end of the tunnel is nothing more than the faint glimmer of a lone candle flickering in the heart of the storm.
These are the days we live in, when fear and worry is as certain as the autumn.....
What's this painting worth? That's more an art than a science
December 5, 2023
Two lone pines stand gracefully on a hilltop. Between them, a small stucco home with a black slate roof rests below a landscape of colored clouds, grey, blue and white, filling the sky. A short dirt path leads to the front door, and a wooden fence can be seen on one side of the grass-covered hill leading away from the house, where if one looks very hard, one might find a flower or two.
Maybe it was special. I really didn’t know, but it was always.....
Air, love and all the other invisible necessities of life
February 13, 2024
Who doesn’t like to breathe? Air. Oxygen. Cool. Warm. Breathing is the sustenance of life we rarely think of. Without it, we are gone from this planet. With it, we are sentient beings confronted by the joys and tribulations of getting through another day.
Awake or asleep, through our mouth or our nose, breathing goes on without ever giving it a thought.
I like that. I like that the most important thing I can do to stay alive.....
When the 'rules for a happy marriage' don’t apply
May 7, 2024
It’s not often that I find a historical document at the bottom of my file cabinet. So imagine my surprise when I came across “Rules for a Happy Marriage,” given to my wife and me by the town clerk of Ramapo, N.Y., in 1985, (along with a package of cantaloupe seeds — get it?) upon applying for our marriage license.
On the good news side, Paula and I are still married. That said, has the experience been happy? Let’s look at the rules......
The day I kidnapped my mother
May 21, 2024
I was sitting at my desk at my job during a period in my life when I had a desk and a job. The phone rang on my direct line. It was my mother.
Mom was in her early 80s and lived alone.
She said, “There’s something I need to tell you.”
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I said, “OK. Tell me.” .....
What I learned from my grandmother
August 6. 2024
My grandmother was a quiet woman who rarely spoke about her childhood growing up in Eastern Europe. I knew she had a brother in South America and a sister in Israel. What I didn’t know was that she had two other siblings who died in the Holocaust. And long before that, before she reached her teens, both of her parents succumbed to the Spanish Flu.
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​To meet her, one would think she was just another nice, old Jewish lady living in the Bronx. She had friends and relatives nearby......
Reckoning with the loss of my father
October 15, 2024
My father died 16 years ago. Were he alive, he would have turned 101 this week. Despite writing extensively about my kids, my wife and my mother, I’ve written practically nothing about him. The one and only time I did was at the request of my mother, who insisted that as the writer in the family, I give my father’s eulogy. Reluctantly, I obliged. This is what I said:
My father preferred The Three Stooges to the three tenors, the Mets to the Yankees and the Giants over the Jets. He taught me how.....
Another sleepless night
October 29, 2024
It was one of those nights. I couldn’t sleep. The big Coke I had with lunch — chock-full of caffeine — didn’t help. Neither did the small Coke I had with dinner. I thought that three hours on my bike and the exhaustion that eventually follows would be more than enough to overwhelm the caffeine surge that kept me awake in the wee hours of the night.
I was wrong: Wrong to get in bed; wrong to close my eyes; wrong to think that the warmth of the blanket over my body on a cool October night would help to put me to sleep; .....
A winter family vacation to warm the heart
January 21, 2025
At 4 a.m. the alarm goes off. Forty minutes, later I’m in the car with my wife and our youngest son heading to Albany International Airport. Two hundred miles away in central New Jersey, my middle son was doing the same, although his destination is Newark Liberty International, while 1,200 miles south my eldest son was sleeping in Miami, where he lives. Soon, he would be awake and shortly thereafter join us for the first Reiss family vacation in more than 15 years.
​I’d like to say I’m living the dream......
Once I was angry, now I seek joy
February 4, 2025
A couple months ago, I started therapy. I lost my cool with one of my adult kids and my wife — the psychologist — suggested for about the 200th time since we’ve been married that I talk to someone other than her. This time I agreed, and I found a therapist.
The therapist asked me why I had come to see him, so I told him about the incident with my son. He then asked what I hoped to get out of our sessions.....
Paying the price of playing nice with sparrows
July 22, 2025
There are few rituals in my life. I brush my teeth before I go to sleep every night. And, along with a few million others, I watch the national news every evening with my wife, although that is more her ritual than mine. Yet beyond these simple activities, I come up woefully empty in the ritual department, which is just fine with me. Heaven forbid I become a creature of habit.
Imagine, then, how I felt when through no fault, desire or inclination of my own a new, third and messy ritual entered my daily routine......
Visitors to my garden
September 2, 2025
I’d like to think he’s my friend despite the fact we have never spoken. Sometimes he’ll be as close as two or three feet away, staring at me intently until he disappears as quickly as he appeared. What could he be thinking? What could he want from me? He is diminutive by comparison, barely larger than my thumb. Yet if he is fascinated by me, I am even more fascinated by him.
Of all the creatures on my land, the ruby-throated hummingbird (the only hummingbird to be found in the Berkshires) is the one that keeps coming back.....
Cycling through life and loss
November 11, 2025
I don’t remember when I learned how to ride a bike. I imagine my father taught me, at least that seems to fit the profile of a kid growing up in the 1960s. I do remember the street where I learned to ride and its 10 white houses all identical except for the color of the shutters. Ours were blue. The neighbors’ were yellow, green and black. What I remember most from that time is a sense of freedom and adventure that soaring on two wheels created whenever I placed my feet on the pedals and began to move forward.....
Vacation can take your mind off winter — but not war
March 24, 2026
My wife, Paula, looks down at her phone. I do the same. She laughs. I cringe. We’re looking at different things. We’re definitely not talking. Dozens of people walk in and out of the restaurant, their plates stacked high from the breakfast buffet. We sip our orange juice and, when not looking at our phones, watch the palm trees bend with the wind. The Sea of Cortez, where 10 years ago I reeled in a 400-pound marlin, is shimmering from the shoreline to the horizon, an enormous blue diamond between mainland Mexico and Cabo San Lucas, where we have gone to escape the long Berkshire County winter.....