Dr. Oliver Wolf Sacks hasn’t been put on my shelf yet. I’m still traveling with him — in so many senses. His memoir, On the Move, with its subdued red and blue cover — minus his striking motorcycle portrait that I  sacrificed along the way, has been in my hands (so snug in my heart, too) in this room and then that room serving up a bolt of literary lightning while I prune or did I mean to say edit my comedy.  His propensity for connecting,  his propulsive caring for his patients, his family, his friends reach the mark throughout. His prose glides so high but yet is so...

Oh, that sizzling sound that erupts when you rip open an envelope with gusto, knowing that something’s good inside and will immediately be yours to devour. And if it’s a letter from Murray K., and Jupiter is high in the sky, there’s a rich avuncular message in a strikingly legible handwriting that carries wisdom to the heart without any squinting about what’s what and which is which to slow digestion. And sometimes, just like this time, screaming out loud creativity climbs out of the envelope, too. Two kaleidoscopic crispy hued bookmarks — butterflies released and a...

In the carefully edited life of Pamela Gilbert-Bugbee, you get the mistaken impression that I grew up in Riverdale (NW Bronx) and only attended conspicuously numbered public schools before graduating from the High School of Music and Art — well, before  it got renamed. Of course, everyone needs a cut-off somewhere.  And even though I aced the fourth grade spelling bee at Village School in Syosset, I bury this victory because only my relatives, on a need-to-know basis, can confirm that from kindergarten through sixth grade, I attended a conspicuously un-numbered public school. Outside of the...