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 […]
Feet and the maiden
Some years I am so weighted down and distracted by my workaday life that I have a hard time locating some authentic, profound feelings of gratitude around the holidays. This year, the news helped me locate some of these sentiments. Happy Thanksgiving, readers. As I slipped on my shoes and left the house the other […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
