Keepin’ it real, friend edition
The other day I was driving my 10-year-old daughter home from swim practice, and we passed the home where a family we knew used to live. “Do you remember Q, the little girl who lived there?” I asked. “No. Yeah. Sort of,” she answered. “What happened to her anyway?” “Her family moved away,” I said. […]
Friends of a Certain Age
The New York Times ran a piece last summer on the difficulty of making friends in adulthood. It generated such a response that they newspaper ran a second piece with a selection of readers’ comments. Clearly the subject of authentic friendship is something that needs more attention than most of us give it. I’ve talked […]
Déjà Vu
Earlier this summer, I decided to screen some of my favorite blockbuster movies for my kids. I only got as far as watching E.T. with my son while my daughter was at camp. Ever since my mom began showing my kids Hitchcock movies a few years ago, I’ve been thinking that it’s part of my […]
Gazpacho and Love
It’s past midsummer here, and even though we live in the middle of Los Angeles, my husband I have a bumper crop of tomatoes. We grow tomatoes, strawberries, basil, and other herbs in Earth Boxes in our backyard. And blueberries in a wine barrel on wheels. It’s my small nod to having grown up on […]
Keeping it real (estate)
Exactly three years ago my husband and I entered the uniquely grownup, age-accelerating experience of buying a home. I have posted this before, but early summer and all the “for sale” signs around town when the weather turns warm always remind me of it. And I’m finally at a point where I don’t start to […]
My selfie, myself
I recently finished reading the excellent, heartbreaking memoir Autobiography of a Face by the late Lucy Grealy, which made me ponder what role a face plays in one’s identity. A Twitter friend (who I actually know in real life — a wonderful poet) the other day referred to “selfies” (that is, self-portraits, particularly taken with […]
Aloha, tristesse **
This is a post I meant to write in early January. File under “sad synchronicity” and “strangers on a beach.” My family went to the Big Island in Hawaii for the week between Christmas and New Years. I was in a funk, as I often am at the holidays, raw and exhausted and not in […]
The Unpleasant Pensieve
This morning as I was having breakfast down in the yellow and blue kitchen here at Ragdale House, a place that calms me like an idealized version of the kitchen in my childhood home in Wisconsin, I had a conversation with the Ragdale housekeeper, R. In a mixture of English and Spanish, I learned that […]
Some Places Where I Used To Live
(Yes, the title is a lame reference to the Gotye song of last year, Somebody That I Used to Know.) This year I’ve had the opportunity to visit two cities where I used to live. Last month I visited Boston when I attended the AWP conference. And right now I’m at an artists’ residency just […]
Amateur Night
Chain chain chain! Chain of fools. (Quoth the longtime fool.) I took this photo out of the moonroof of my car on Valentines Day, as my husband and I fought five minutes of traffic to go to our favorite Japanese restaurant. Normally traffic is about like this on Thursday nights at rush hour, but I […]
