This weekend, we hosted a baby shower for a very good friend from school. In a last pre-baby hurrah, the mom-to-be finagled a day off and declared the shower would continue in the desert. It was the kind of spontaneous trip we used to do quite a bit, but haven’t in ages. We tossed our [...]
Archive for the ‘Offspring’ category
Collective joy: Record Club hits 100
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last seven or eight years thinking about the history of friendship. Writing a book about a friendship circle — a group that even named itself the “Friendly Club” — took me into an extensive (and still growing), multidisciplinary body of literature that explains why and how the [...]
Bike service
I’m itching to invest in a rickshaw. A pedicab. Maybe just a big old adult trike.
This is what I think while I pedal my twelve-year-old daughter Anna to volleyball practice three mornings a week at 7 am. We head south, first down Center Market or Mulberry through Little Italy, which at the moment is strung with an [...]
Thanksgiving: A manifesto, a menu, and a recipe for mincemeat
For me, being in control of Thanksgiving is synonymous with adulthood.
To some degree, my family of origin determined this association. The young’uns sat at the kids’ table in the other room until deemed old enough (or enough of your aunts and uncles hadn’t shown up at your grandmother’s house) that you were invited to eat [...]
Lots of things are more interesting than working
Here are some things I’ve thought were loads more fun than being at work in the past week:
1. Halloween. It has always been my favorite holiday, from the time I was little and my mom used to make me whatever costume I asked for.
Farrell and I have enjoyed many a zany Halloween holiday, and I have [...]
Sunset sail, Schooner Pioneer, Port of New York
New York Harbor is a tidal estuary. Tides moving in from the Atlantic Ocean have a force that reaches Troy, New York, a three-hour drive upstate from Manhattan. The harbor’s Upper Bay is fed in turn by the Hudson (the Mahicans called the river “Muh-he-kun-ne-tuk,” which means “the river that flows both ways”) and by the Long Island Sound, via [...]
Pondering the revolution
Three weeks ago I bought a Sony PlayStation 2.
I made the purchase with misgivings. I left it in the closet while I wrestled between the desire for our family to have a cooler gaming system than Nintendo Gamecube and the shame of gross consumption with the potential of violent behavior. I had visions of my [...]
U-G-L-Y, you ain’t got no a-li-bi
How much of your psyche is imprinted in the first few hours of life? The first few weeks? The first few months? Does it matter whether your mom had a difficult labor, or whether she was Scientologifically quiet? And how important is it, during that first year, to encounter a warm and accepting world looking [...]
Coach
My childhood history with sports was checkered. My dad (who’d been called “Coach” my whole life) would come home, announce he was coaching fourth grade basketball, and suddenly there I was, on a team I hadn’t signed up for, passing a whole season without scoring a single point. One year he announced I’d be playing [...]
