Cute little divining rods
An interesting thing has been happening to me when I’m out with my baby. This may have happened with my first two children, but honestly, it’s been over a decade, and I don’t remember. (I didn’t remember until today how tedious and Sisyphean quartering and peeling grapes for a baby is.) I’ve been encountering acquaintances […]
Supernatural: an intergenerational tale
Recently I found a link to audio from the first storytelling show that I participated in, the Spark Off Rose show from October 2010. The theme was “Supernatural,” and most of us told ghost stories of one kind or another. I read a story from the memoir manuscript I’ve been working on, about the few […]
Annie Hall, 2014
The other night “Annie Hall” was on cable. I’d forgotten in all the Woody Allen pedophilia and incest allegations in the news in the last year that I really loved some of his early movies, including this one from 1977. I’m pretty sure I saw this movie in the mid-1980s in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I […]
Tenderness
Tenderness, where is the Tenderness, where is it I don’t know where I am but I know I don’t like it I open my mouth and out pops something spiteful words are so cheap but they can turn out expensive – Dave Wakeling, “Tenderness” (sung by General Public), 1984 I haven’t written much lately […]
Finding Grateful, 2013 edition
If you know me in real life or have read my blog at the end of the year in the past, you will know that I am a self-identified holiday hater. I’m not proud of that, but why pretend otherwise? To sum it up, the gradual loathing came about as a result of the […]
Spying in plain sight
On Christmas Eve when I was flying with my family to go on vacation, I gave myself a treat. I re-read a book that I loved as a child: Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. Reading a beloved book from childhood has been hit or miss in recent years. I had wildly happy memories of […]
The nature of the beast
This is my first dog, Genji, in 1999, when he was a few months old. When he wasn’t gnawing on nylabones or other chew toys, he spent some valuable hours chewing my Swedish wood clogs and a couple of pairs of underwear from the laundry hamper. His other pastimes included digging into my husband’s armpits […]
I wanna know what love is
“There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations and yet fails so regularly as love.” –Erich Fromm Last month I began reading this book. It’s a challenging book, a short, dense, mid-century tome, written by a European psychoanalyst and social theorist. In short, despite the title The […]
Private Matters and Choices
What did the old fashioned feminists and political moderates used to say? That abortion ought to be safe, legal, and rare? Also, that it was a private matter, one for a woman (and in the case of a married woman, she and her husband) to discuss and decide. I remember the conservative politicians in the […]
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