Alan Sivell's A Boomer Life Alan R Sivell

I was a “love it or leave it” kind of guy when I left for college. I was proud to say I was a reactionary. “Better dead than red” I had written on the binder I carried around senior year. It should have contained notes from my classes […]

Until college, I had no idea that freedom could be associated in any way with the word school. In high school, the piercing tremolo of the electronic school “bell” controlled our lives. It rang almost two dozen times each day, the first blast signaling it was time to […]

I headed off to college about as unprepared as anyone in the history of heading off to college. When I got my class schedule, I was surprised you didn’t have to stay in school all day like high school. I didn’t realize that your time was your own […]

Senior year, I lost a fight to a guy on crutches. And it’s worse than it sounds. He wasn’t even standing during the fight. I was. It started because I was in charge of the student lounge, previously an unused, first-floor classroom on the science wing which became […]

The first time I tasted beer was in my grandmother’s kitchen. We were down from Connecticut in her front-to-back row house in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn on Easter Sunday. I was 4. I had mixed emotions about going to my grandmother’s house on holidays. I loved my […]

It was a seemingly innocent remark. But with it, early in our senior year, our new school president, John Abraham, set in motion one of the hottest social events of the year. John was at his locker, exchanging his books from the previous class for his books for […]