MSI Press Blog

Precerpt (excerpt prior to publication from the forthcoming memoir,  In with the East: A Mary Poppins Kind of Life  by Dr. Betty Lou Leaver The Lilac Bush Across the driveway from the apple orchard and in front of the house—facing the winding rural roadway that snaked up and down the hills of Acton—stood the lilac bush. That old road wandered off in one direction toward Milton Mills, New Hampshire, and in the other toward Lebanon, Maine. In fact, the road itself divided Maine from New Hampshire as it crossed the river and passed the tanning mill. The state line was unmarked, but the family whose house straddled it knew exactly where it lay. The township boundary, they told us, was decided by the location of their master bedroom. One year, when they became fed up with Acton, they simply switched the master bedroom with another room and thereby "moved" their house to Lebanon. They have lived in Lebanon ever since. The lilac bush—lavish with purple lilacs, the state flower of Ne...

  Precerpt (excerpt prior to publication from the forthcoming memoir,  In with the East: A Mary Poppins Kind of Life  by Dr. Betty Lou Leaver The apple orchard was our front yard—if any place on a farm can rightly be called a "front yard." It was the stretch of land across the dirt driveway from the farmhouse, bordering the winding country road that separated our upper fields, corral-pasture, clothesline, house, and orchard from the lower fields, the swale, and the pine woods beyond. In one far corner of the orchard, under a stand of birch trees, alongside the road, lay the tiny, timeworn Prescott family cemetery. May they rest in peace, whoever they were. The birches partially screened the orchard from the road, adding to its at-times quiet charm and at-other-times privacy for boisterous play. The apple orchard was the hub of our lives. Besides giving us apples, pears, and even cherries—it was, in truth, a mixed orchard though we always called it "the apple orchard...

  (Princess Muna in white, middle; Me in black, far right; Dr. Alexa, NYIT/NY, in blue, far right; others - members of the American Psychological Association) I knew who she was. She knew who I was. But I had never personally met Princess Muna until the American Psychological Association came to Jordan on the quest of setting up a degree in psychology at one of the universities there. Until then, psychology was not a topic of study at any of the several universities in the country. At the time, I was working as the chief academic officer at New York Institute of Technology in Amman, Jordan. We also had a very small branch, computer science studies only, in Irbid, Jordan on the campus of the Jordan University of Science and Technology, which oversaw the in-country activities of NYIT. Princess Muna (nee Tony Gardner) was/is the mother of King Abdullah. A Brit by origin, she wed King Abdullah's father, King Hussein, a much-beloved (for obvious reasons, it seemed to me) royal, one whos...