You mean I’m the only one who knows that this is my 99th blog post? And am I the only one who realizes that each one of us will have to wait an entire extra day to blow out our candles again, next year, because 2016 is a leap year, which means that instead of my waiting roughly 340 -plus days for my next birthday to show up — because February 29 is getting added into the mix next year, adding yet another delay to our birthday waiting game. You can do the necessary calculations and see how an extra day between birthdays tallies up for you. And when you’re waiting for a birthday, just...

It didn’t look like an interview was in progress from where I was sitting.  Otherwise I would have knocked first, which is very hard to do when your hair is being shampooed by your favorite hair stylist on the island (make that the world) who is simultaneously having a coded exchange with an aspiring stylist about her plans to enhance the hair of a targeted customer.  My immensely talented hair stylist, the owner, was offering brief pointers but also sizing up the formulas cited by the outsider who was now very much of an insider for the time being in the popular shop. The outsider operating as...

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...

I was 30 years old and feeling pretty snug in my spot.  As the managing editor of a respected NYC trade journal, I spent hours and hours each week interviewing shipping executives.  Everything was as my title suggested … manageable, until one spring day, when my boss, Jon Jacobs, set me on the trail of my very first ever high tech (as we called it back then) assignment. “Call Bill Bugbee at CSS in Oregon and find out what’s going on out there.” “Oregon?  His name is what?” I asked in a mocking tone. “His name is Bill Bugbee …” How could I start a...