Authors Electric

  Zooming with daughters & a granddaughter My internet connection was down the better part of this past week for causes I'll not bother explaining. The outage nearly caused me to miss posting this missive for the first time in my seven years with Authors Electric. So please excuse this scribble to be rougher than most. It also involves my four dear daughters, who inspire me, but whose privacy I am careful to respect. I therefore proceed with double caution while doing my best to keep it lively. My grid bump brought home how critically I've come to depend on the 'net. Like most of us these days, I do nearly everything via a wifi -  tablets, computers, smart phones, smart TVs and sundry e-apps and appliances. I write to the Cloud, in that I've taken to using Google.docs in my work, which saves itself automatically on my Google Drive out there in Google's-Cloud-o-sphere -- scattered among giga-bytes of e-digits. These are tools of my trade. I am, after all, an indi...

My father, Renzo and I in Boston, c. 1941 My father, shows up this time of year, visiting my intermittently lit memories in the same way that he drifted in and out of my childhood with his bag of contradictions. Renzo Argentino Tosi would be 100 on June 9. Then there's Father's Day , third Sunday in June – still a Mother's Day greeting-card afterthought when I was a kid. I always gave him ties. He disdained gifts and the commercial sentimentality of holidays, but loved festive gatherings – big family dinners, Italian-American picnics . Plus he was an inveterate skinflint – also a narcissist with empathic talent. He was a successful businessman who scorned the financial system as a con. Life was a game of one one-upmanship most of the time – whether in relationships or playing golf or dominoes (which he loved.) He was a misogynist who admired women of substance, attracted to strong-willed women with whom he had stormy relationships. He was pro civil rights and an...