Guy I work with has a son named Jack. Good kid. Solid. 8-years-old. Asked his dad the other day where babies come from. Guy suspected his son already knew and was testing his dad to see how much truth dad would tell. Guy tells the truth, the graphic truth – penis this, vagina that. Jack [...]
Archive for the ‘Offspring’ category
Hogwarts Square diary entry (no spoilers!)
My favorite part of the Harry Potter series has always been its attention to media and memory — gadgets and goodies like Dumbledore’s Pensieve, the Marauder’s Map, owl-delivered letters (some of which actually scream at you if you’ve been bad), text books on Monsters that are themselves eager to bite you, memory charms, photos that wave to [...]
On aging
The week my older daughter became a teenager, the Consulate of the Principality of Monaco called to say she’d won a round-trip flight there, three nights in a four-star hotel. These things would surprise me more if I hadn’t lived with her for the last thirteen years. This is new territory, and I’ve been dreading it for at [...]
Thursday linkage: All over the place edition
If you’re wondering whether our country is still more or less a democracy (let alone the kind of state that might help bring about whirled peas or whatever), you must not have read the Washington Post series on Dick Cheney and his frightening influence on the country these past six years. He’s been astonishingly effective [...]
Missing the prom
I was not the best person to go with my son to rent a tux for Prom. My husband would have been nonchalant and price conscious. For him it would have been another errand like buying new air conditioner filters or bread. For me it was complicated. But then, my husband went to both his Proms and I did [...]
The Great Whatsit
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
