My Father’s Bones
A couple of weeks ago, Lea Thau, founder and producer of the KCRW radio storytelling show “Strangers” interviewed me. It was a remarkable experience, and I enjoyed talking with […]
LLAP
A few days ago, beloved actor Leonard Nimoy passed away at age 83 after being ill with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The Internet was awash in memories and sadness. I was busy all day but noticed the outpouring on social media. He meant a lot to me, as he did to many science fiction loving […]
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 […]
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 […]
The empty cart
Late January 2014 For the last several months I have been mentally flagellating myself, trying to declutter my garage. My husband, kids, and I moved into this house over three years ago, and the unpacking process was a never-ending Hydra of paper, housewares, and detritus from grad school and earlier. I claimed that I’d finished […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
