Larry Benjamin. Wordsmith. Writer. Author.

“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cheerfully took me under her wing sharing with me what I needed to know—things that weren’t mentioned in HR’s dry and out-of-date PowerPoints, or in my vague, slightly misleading job description.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...

Old. A word innocuous enough, and certainly useful at times. We’ve all heard it and used it and read it without any particular feeling. But recently the word became attached to me and… whoa boy …I have feelings. It started last year when I found myself suddenly unemployed. Being one to pick myself up and dust myself off and get back on the horse that threw me, I mentioned to a retired friend that I was looking for a new job. “Aren’t you too old to get a new job?” she asked. “No,” I answered, probably somewhat cockily. After all I was a catch . I have decades of experience and there is practically nothing in the arena of corporate communications that I hadn’t done, or experienced. I’m an award-winning fiction writer, for God’s sake! Then of course, my friend turned out to be the frickin’ Oracle at Delphi . I climbed off my high horse, decided to focus on my writing and got a job that would allow me to do just that. Pretty quickly the young people there attached “Mr.” to my name, ...