Stories I Tell Myself

Linda Brody Bakst on Brooklyn, growing up, identity and more

Category: Road Trips

  • Yesterday we drove through the Berkshires on the way home from visiting our daughter. The oranges, reds and yellows of autumn were on full display. I selected Jackson Browne’s Solo Acoustic Album 2 as the soundtrack for our ride. The song “Alive in the World” came on. I looked at the magnificent scenery as the…

  • Though I don’t consider myself a photographer, I do like to take pictures. I find that, as long as I don’t get too caught up in the mechanics of it, it helps to notice the beauty around me and to solidify the memory in my brain. I snapped a lot of pictures on our trip…

  • I originally planned this trip to the southwest of the United States in 2019 long before I had ever heard of Covid-19. We were supposed to go in May of 2020 but had to cancel, much to my disappointment. Well, we are taking the trip now! This past Friday we flew from Albany to Albuquerque,…

  • Note: I wrote a blot post about gratitude a while ago (you can find it at https://stories-i-tell-myself.com/2019/03/11/gratitude/). The impetus for that essay was International Women’s Day and I reflected on the women in my life for whom I was most grateful. Interestingly, that post is the single most read offering among the 305 (!) posts…

  • Though it has been a dark time, and I will spare you the list of terrible things happening in the world, I want to focus on something lighter (literally and figuratively). When I moved to Albany, New York 36 years ago, I was dimly aware that the area was originally settled by the Dutch (well,…

  • We are now two weeks out from the wedding and we still know of only one case of Covid. We dodged a bullet, and I am so grateful to our guests and vendors for helping to make it as safe as possible. We are so lucky to have memories of a joyous event largely untainted…

  • Thank you to all who responded to last week’s post. Many of you shared, here on the blog or on Facebook, what you do to de-stress and refill yourself. So many good ideas were offered: physical activities (for example, bicycling and yoga are two that stay with me), talking to family and friends, sleep (of…

  • In October of 1989, when Daniel was 7 months old and Leah was almost 2 ½ , Gary and I took our first trip to the Outer Banks. Prior to that I had never even heard of it. I didn’t know it was a narrow barrier island that mirrored the coast of North Carolina –…

  • NOTE: I wanted to include additional (better) photographs to this post, but the platform wasn’t accepting the format of some. It is a mystery to me. I tried editing them in different ways, accessing them in different ways….I gave up. Oh well. Hopefully you will get my intention. We are six months into the pandemic.…

  • On Saturday Gary and I met friends and went to Dia, an art museum in Beacon, New York, in the Hudson Valley. The building was repurposed, it had been a box factory for Nabisco. It featured large spaces that housed huge installations – sculptures, paintings, arrangements of stuff. We were told it was 30,000 square…