Month: January 2012

  • That Solid Inward Comfort of Mind

    When I was growing up, I took piano lessons for nine years. At some point during my tenure as ivory tickler, my teacher, Mrs. Wolverton, asked me to start tracking my practice minutes each week and then submit them to her at the start of each lesson. It was as though she suspected something was […]

  • My Buddy

      A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words. – Bernard Meltzer   One of my best friends is turning 9 today.   He is a character–funny, perceptive, bullheaded, complicated. He is a reader; tests reported that he started […]

  • Armistead Maupin Preferred the Shelter of Fiction, But With That Attitude He’d Have Been Dead By Midnight If He Lived in Northern Minnesota

    Probably because the weather has been so forbidding this week–damn cold and unbelievably blustery–we’ve been delighting in indoor pursuits. The grey and the dark and the blow-the-pants-right-off-your-legs wind outside all highlight the beauty of food, conversation, warmth, shelter, reminding us how fortunate we are to have relief from the elements. Last night, hours after my […]

  • I Went to Weight Watchers and Refused to Do The Wave

    When the tide is working its way towards the shore, it doesn’t just rush in, plop onto the sectional couch, and dig in to a plate of nachos. Rather, it flows in stirringly, breaches the sandy banks, and then recedes. As the water retreats centrifugally, giving in to gravity and the moon, regrouping for the […]

  • A Bracelet of Barbie Hands for Everyone!

    “I am haunted by waters,” ends Norman Maclean’s lyrical novella A River Runs Through It. The word “haunted,” as Maclean intends it, is not so much “plaguing my nightmares”—in the fashion of John Lithgow’s serial killer turn on Dexter, where he plants a victim on the outside edge of a balcony and tells her she […]