First Person
Dry plaster & dandelions
Travel teaches and challenges —Susie Rom gleans this and other life lessons from Leonardo and dandelions in Milan.
Proudly American in Milan
Journalist Susie Rom paints a lovely portrait of Milan, and its recent Winter Olympics, from the POV of a Media Production student at the U of Florida.
Chemo girls
I’ve been quiet in recent years. Like a mouse. Breast cancer and chem can do that. Zap your zeal on the [...]
RFK Jr., Aslan, and me
I was the youngest in my small family, the baby, and was always considered the quiet and sensitive one. But quiet [...]
The spirit of Catanzaro
Italy has long been modern Europe’s foremost repository for offhand clichés. Italians, according to other Europeans, simply could not (and would [...]
Unequal compassion
My friend Barbara is exceptional in so many ways I can hardly keep track of them. She and her husband Arek [...]
Villainy’s double standards
A friend called me the other day to ask what I thought of the horrifying and surreal news — those were [...]
Cool, calm, hysterical
A few weeks ago, a young friend of mine who had been feeling “not right” for the better part of a [...]
Reading back Germany
Once upon a time, I was — in every way — what most people used to call a military brat. I [...]
Mortal man’s dilemma
To you, the readers of this oration of mine, my scrawl, I must immediately confess two truths. My name is not [...]
That vanishing habit
These days I’m busy compiling ghost stories. Most of them are miles away from mansions and graveyards, but that doesn’t make [...]
Risk no more
Here’s a little confession that, at this point in my life, won’t do a single soul any harm (and it’s not [...]