Author: Jocelyn

  • Revisiting Narnia: Wait, I Never Got This As a Kid…Aslan Is Jesus?

    One day back in 1700, when we were classmates at Cautionary Epistle school, my chum Samuel Richardson and I took a break from hunching over our Remonstrance Homework long enough to survey a coterie of our cohorts kicking a rotten cabbage around the schoolyard. Abruptly, their play was interrupted by a crotchety crone who limped…

  • The Smell of Success…or Perhaps an Abundance of Broccoli

    “Can I just go into the bathroom and take off my clothes and come back out for a redo?” I asked the Tidy Tiny sporting a delicious wool cardigan and a name tag letting me know she’d lost 24 pounds and kept it off for 12 years. “I’d actually go for a naked weigh-in this…

  • Delights

    Usually, February is a dreary month, one that lasts for about nineteen years. I often find myself counting the minutes during the doldrums of February. Not this year. The days are flying by. I’m having a really, really good time, largely because: 1) Paco has decided he loves the Billy Joel song “Piano Man.” While…

  • I Thought That I Should Never See/Poems So Stuffed With The Kiwi

      The teacher thanked us all for coming, ending her welcoming speech with, “And I’ve told all the kids that the parents are here to enjoy their poetry, not to judge their poetry.” “Aw, come on,” whispered the hipster rock star dad sitting behind me (no, really, he is a rock star; his band is…

  • 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…

  • Girl, Discovered

      Effortlessly, they became her best friends. In a year nearly free of peer interactions, she needed them. In a year of new and strange and awkward, she needed to feel less alone. And they were there. Amber and Mollie and Madison and Abby and Arriana and Madison and Alyssa and Dakota and Sareena and…