Val Mccullough

How do you feel when you flip through your high school yearbook? Do you look at the photos in the yearbook with fondness? Or do you say to yourself, “Well, I’m glad that’s over.”

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Earlier this month, I’d said to myself, “This will be the year I’ll plant a garden to attract butterflies and bees.”

Before the days of fast fashion — when it’s easy to buy too much stuff — clothing types were well etched in my mind. There were school clothes, rough-and-tumble after-school clothes, and holiest of holies — church clothing. Categories…

The summer of 1964 was filled with birthday parties for kittens, inflatable wading pools and popsicles. By the end of the summer, the amusement park welcomed its first neighborhood customers, and I had fallen in love with a small plot of…

​Last weekend was a happy two-for-one celebration at my house. My kids hosted a bridal shower for my granddaughter ​Caroline, and we also celebrated my 91st birthday.

I huddled under the bleachers during the fireworks display at Coney Island that year. I was 3 years old. It was 1938. My parents were seated on planks, a few feet above me, enjoying the fireworks. I’m guessing they tried to hold and…

I seem to lose friends by the week. Most of us are in our 90s, so this should not be a surprise, but I am not ready to let them go.

I wish I’d known the truth of it back then. I didn’t know Alice — not her real name — had a baby when we were juniors in high school. Things like that were kept hush-hush in 1952.

While we struggle with cyclospora here in the U.S., a salad of a different kind is being served up in the Strait of Hormuz. The Hormuz Salad features clumps of seaweed, small sea animals, barnacles, bacteria and toxins.

Leonard Urban and Dietrick Bonhoeffer. Both men could have stayed silent. But their consciences wouldn’t let them.