I could have felt hurt or offended. A very close friend admitted to me that he couldn’t bring himself to finish my recently published book, a seriocomic memoir called, “Don’t Say a Word!: A Daughter’s Two Cents”. The book is about my parents’ bizarre unraveling at the end of their lives and their refusal to […]
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A Shocking Story
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Essays
The photo suggests a peaceful day in the country, but the accompanying story relates anything but. This is Hix Bridge, in Westport, MA, where Joseph Grinnell, a 16 year-old apprentice, encountered three enslaved fugitives attempting to reach a Quaker safe house in 1790s New Bedford. The grim and shocking account was excerpted in the […]
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Know Thyself: Through Photos
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Decoding Our Parents, Essays
It is generally held that the road to mastering internal conflict winds through our past and back to the conflict’s source. As children, we do our best to make sense of what feels wrong, with whatever limited understanding we have at that moment. And so we often come to false conclusions–most commonly that we were […]
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Infant Care: Us vs. Them
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Essays, Reverse Parenting
When my daughter Zoe came to visit with 5 month-old Zach, my first grandchild, we looked together through the photo album I’d made of her first year. In it we found a picture of me feeding her in the very same rocker in which she liked to sit feeding her baby. Nothing had changed. And […]
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Love At First Sight: My Side
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Essays, Travel Lessons
My husband Michael and I fell in love at first sight, and for fifty years I’ve always told the story about that afternoon the same way. We met by chance. He’d been asked to give a lift to a college friend of mine who had been invited to the same out of town wedding. On […]
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Early Trauma That Won’t Let Go
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Decoding Our Parents, Essays
We tend to take our strong aversions as a given, but behind them there surely lies an explanation and a story full of feeling. Recently, I had reason to recall my having once been so allergic to French as to have become entirely deaf-mute in the language, a condition I’d never questioned. So, when I […]
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First Love, Revisited
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Essays
I’d been happily married for 46 years, and yet my heart still raced whenever my college boyfriend crossed my mind. We hadn’t been in touch since the affair ended without grief, when Ernst graduated and returned to Germany. But when my husband Michael and I decided to visit Berlin, the thought of seeing Ernst again, […]
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How do Mexicans view race?
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Blog
Eduardo Porter, who describes himself as “the son of a tallish, white father from Chicago and a short, brown Mexican mother of European and Indian blood, wrote in the NY Times (Aug 11, 2008) about how differently race is viewed in Mexico, where he grew up, than in the USA. According to him: “Today […]
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is race fact or fiction?
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Blog
Science has shown that there is no biological way to assign people to individual racial groups. Having originated in Africa and spread all over the globe, human beings share 99.8% of all their genes, the last 2% being for all human variation, not just race. Environment and culture have had a major impact on […]
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the power of chocolate
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Blog
The BBC, on April 16, 2007, reported on experiments on the effects of melting chocolate in the mouth that showed increased brain activity and heart rate greater than from passionate kissing – and lasting 4 times as long. “Psychologist Sue Wright said: “Chocolate contains phenylethylamine which can raise levels of endorphins, the pleasure-giving substances, […]