Riding the Fung Wah bus from New York to Boston is cheap and more interesting than driving alone. Last week I found myself surrounded by the typical mix of ages, languages, food odors and fragments of music leaking from many earphones. I left my iPod in my bag, choosing instead to vaguely fill in a [...]
Author Archive
Idle thoughts on a working life
Throw a party, break a few wine glasses, I can replace them with handblown stems even more beautiful. What about your brother-in-law sleeping on that old camp cot? Even if he does stay too long, isn’t it time to buy a new sofa bed? Imagine those tulips arrayed in a perfectly fluted vase or a [...]
A valentine to my editor across the pond
I have always fantasized that I was a Greta Garbo style writer, longing to be left alone in a room of my own. Writing is a solitary affair, in a garret, with a cough and a half bottle of whiskey, observing human foibles from afar. In daydreams I have cast myself in every stereotype, reveling [...]
Her best client
I have a crush on my physical therapist.
She is all Charlize-Meg-Reese perky with blond curly hair and eyes the color of her pale blue sweater. She is like a favorite second grade teacher who always knew what to say and when to say it and we all vied for front row seats in her classroom. She smiles [...]
For you, twenty years later
The first time I saw you I was sitting in the back pew of a church. You stood up dressed like a Kennedy, wearing a white shirt, a red bow tie, a navy wool sports jacket and khakis. You spoke about Medieval Japan and Portuguese missionaries crucified upside down and I inhaled your words, verbal pheromones [...]
SPAM key circa 1971
Sweat rolls down my cheeks and my hair is laced with spider webs and dried flies. I am filthy from the attic. I have been rummaging long enough to be light-headed from the trapped heat, probably over a hundred and ten degrees. I have worked hard to retrieve a box. The packing tape on the [...]
Lone tree
Our guide was pointing out the prehistoric waterline of Bonneville Lake when I noticed it: a single tree of surprisingly deep green on a hillside covered in dry, endless grass. It was like a storybook illustration or a prop in a diorama, a tree almost too perfect—gnarled and asymmetrical in just the right places—as if [...]
I was a teenage grown-up
The bookstore in our neighborhood has been counting down to the release of the final Harry Potter book since January. We have stickers pasted all over our house proclaiming Snape to be either “a friend” or “a foe.” The hubbub will reach its apex today when the mall adjoining the bookstore will transform into “Harry Potter [...]
Luck be a lady tomorrow
Tomorrow will be the “luckiest” day in a long time (7/7/07 – triple lucky number seven). Every wedding venue is booked, pregnant women are taking long walks and eyeing the castor oil, Vegas is the center of the universe. Countless bloggers around the world are speculating what the formula might bring: conversations probably not much [...]
Population 79
Once upon a time . . . we went into the woods.
Not actually into the woods, more like a bluff or a field with a creek and scattered trees, definitely the Country.
My family—my husband, two teenage boys and I—have loyalty, a spirit of adventure and a love for musical theater. So when an actor friend [...]
