Larry Benjamin. Wordsmith. Writer. Author.

I feel silly for feeling nostalgic about Summer 2024 and its adventures—feeding the giraffes and a bison at the Elmwood Park Zoo; ziplining for the first (and last) time at Urban Air; watching our crepe myrtles release their blooms the color of cranberry sauce; listening to the songs that would form the summer’s soundtrack. It’s September.   The calendar tells us there are 20-some-odd days of summer left; yet we all know—Summer draws its last breath each year at midnight on Labor Day. School buses are back on the roads, tangling traffic; college campuses are buzzing with activity; people are closing up their shore houses; radio stations are rushing to name the songs of summer 2024. The latter has made me decide to name my own songs of this summer. More on that in a minute. Perhaps it’s a sign of getting older, but time seems to be passing lickety-split. June marked ten years of us being legally married. My brother and his wife will celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary this...

“She is gone,” she said, “She is dead.” “What?” I asked, wondering how this could be. She was only 35. She was the most alive person I’d ever met. She vibrated with life to the tips of her exquisitely painted acrylic nails. When I think of her, many adjectives come to mind: tacky—she loved red and black and leopard prints, unfortunately often in combination, and false eyelashes that perched like tarantulas over her big brown eyes, and lace-front wigs in blonde and Lucille Ball red, and lipstick in bright red and the dark colors of mourning—promiscuous; combative. She was unapologetically herself. She was raucous and raunchy. She had a heart of gold; sterling silver pumped through her veins. She was funny and clever and caring and supportive. When I first started working with her, she cheerfully took me under her wing sharing with me what I needed to know—things that weren’t mentioned in HR’s dry and out-of-date PowerPoints, or in my vague, slightly misleading job description. Of...

Today we’ve been married 27 years, using the date of our “commitment” ceremony, which was the only option available to us at the time—and our tenth (legal) wedding anniversary, thanks to the Pennsylvania state legislature who granted us the right to marry a year before SCOTUS declared in the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision which ruled that the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. From the time I was 12 years old, I knew I would marry a boy. I didn’t have a plan or a road map but, even then, I had a vision and no doubt that one day I would. June 28, which is the date of both our commitment ceremony and legal marriage, is also the anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion which kicked off the modern-day gay rights movement. We didn’t choose that date originally for its historical significance, rather it was a practical decision; we didn’t want to...

I remember as a kid hearing that getting old was like entering a second childhood. Well, I’m here at the ripe old age of 64 to tell you that’s not true; getting old is more like going through a second adolescence. My body is changing in unexpected ways: I have arthritis in my right index finger, me knees creak and crack; my blood has decided to store iron. Like an adolescent, I think I know everything, except now in this second adolescence, I really do know everything—or at least a little. Here’s what I know : It will get better. If you find yourself going through hell, keep going; it’s a “passthrough” town. He’s not going to change. You can just say no. As I did back then, I find myself imagining my future self—what will I look like—and my future. Back then I’d tried to visualize my collegiate life: Where would I go to college? What would I study? Would I make friends? Would I find a boyfriend. And my post-collegiate life: would I drive a BMW or a Porsche? Would I real...

Kristi Noem wrote a book. I read an Associated Press article about it. And almost cried. I pulled my dogs, Atticus and Gatsby, onto my lap. I would never hurt them. I would kill anyone who tried to hurt them. Apparently in her book “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward,” Noem recounts the tale of Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer she was training for pheasant hunting. (I won’t even address the grossness and cruelty of pheasant hunting here.) When Cricket turned out to be a dud at pheasant hunting, she admits she hated her and thought she was untrainable. By her own account, she led Cricket to a gravel pit and shot her. When we had to put my first dog, Channing, down, I was in the room with him. I stepped away so he wouldn’t see me cry. Weak and sick as he was, he lifted his head to see where I’d gone. In that moment I felt all the trust he had in me hanging in the balance. I went back and knelt in front of him, holding...

I called him Mark Stephen (his first and middle names); he called me “my little Rusty Dusty,” a reference to my reddish hair and freckles and my skinny frame that was so much smaller than his broad-shouldered muscular one. He was dark-skinned with large luminous green eyes. Looks wise he was way out of my league. Still, he had been the one who approached me . He was my first boyfriend; the first man to tell me he loved me; the first man I loved; the first man to break my heart. He once dared me to hold his hand as we walked across campus. When I did, he admired my bravery. I was a junior in college, he was in his second year of law school when we met. He gave me his phone number. (I still have that piece of paper somewhere.) He stared at me for a minute in stunned silence and then said, “So you gonna give me yours?” “Oh,” I said embarrassed. He took me to lunch on the Mosholo the next day. That night he asked me to go for a ride. He parked under a tree and leaned over and kisse...