As a girl growing up in Plains states, I thought all I could ever want was Brooklyn. I never dreamed of living in New York City in general, just Brooklyn. I loved movies set in Brooklyn and people from Brooklyn. It just seemed so obviously better than all other places on Earth that nothing else [...]
Archive for the ‘Health’ category
Holding out for a hero
When I was in sixth grade, the teacher gave us a writing assignment. “Write about one of your heroes,” she said. As my classmates immediately thought of firemen, their grandma or Jesus, I had to ponder my options. Joan of Arc? Harriet Tubman? Louis Braille? Superman? Athena? Woody Guthrie? Teresa of Ávila? The list was [...]
Till human voices wake us, and we drown
Because of a family medical history predisposing me to cancer, I have an MRI screening at least once a year, sometimes twice. Most people I mention this to express a claustrophobic terror of this experience, but I find there’s something perversely peaceful about it. Getting tucked into a heavy double layer of blankets, I start [...]
I want to get old
Reading this excellent, somewhat-Shandean meditation on the glories of post-menopausal life by Roseanne Barr got me all jealous. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been spending a lot of my time around post-menopausal women lately, but I’m going through a phase in which I simply can’t wait to be in my mid-50′s. I think that’s [...]
Old
My parents are only in their early 70s…not so old, right? Two weeks of vacation with parent 1 and then parent 2 brought me face to face with the brutal reality of our immortality. Actually, I don’t think it’s the immortality that worries me. It’s the aging. Mother has always been a challenge. Apparently, as [...]
Are we forgetting art?
Obviously, some among us are getting that art made all the time, doing the painting and the playing and the poeming for the rest of us. Making art might be your job, your hobby, or something you end up doing because your kid needs a story, a song, or a drawing buddy. Some of us [...]
Night owl
As I write these words, it’s 4:37 am. Again. Sure, 4:37 comes twice a day every day, but I’ve been making quite a chum out of this particular time of day lately. We’ve been having a lot of dates recently, going hot and heavy. Sometimes I think maybe I’m not going to see 4:37, but [...]
Porcelain God
I wrote something way serious but I opted instead to write something odd and maybe slightly dumb and scrapped the serious thing. Farewell, serious thing! So instead. Long about 1991 Newsweek ran a small piece about a scene in Thelma and Louise that lasts, I don’t know, certainly under fifteen seconds. In this scene, Thelma [...]
A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again
I’ve been playing this game a long time: Ever since I was little, I liked to play hard and get dirty on the field. I still love it now. Oh, don’t worry – I’m not going to stop playing softball. It’s too much fun. What I am going to stop doing [...]
Million Dollar Baby
I never thought I’d be one of those women whose prime directive is the fruitless pursuit of a baby, but it’s happened. I was 38 when I met The Fella. We married in the summer of my 40th year, and began our life together in hot pursuit of creating another life. Fun, carefree sex morphed [...]
