Category Archives: Memories
Remembering
My mother died a month ago. She was 98. I don’t know what to write about her now. I’ve written about her so many times already; I’m not sure what else I could say. She was bright. She was funny. She was beautiful. She was kind. She was a daughter, a wife, a mother, a …
Collection Time
I’m here to collect on some debts. Some very old debts. What I am owed is: Sympathy. Sometimes you have little accidents doing something stupid. You don’t want your stupidity revealed. When you hurt yourself being a dumbbell, you kind of have to keep quiet about it. Pretending everything is fine when it isn’t may …
Old Poetry
When I was a teenager, I wrote a lot of poetry. Some of it was good – I won a few awards. But most of it was typical adolescent mediocrity. Life is never more unfair or more glorious than when you are seventeen. Most of it didn’t survive. I remember only orphan lines. They come …
Not Having Children
(I wrote this essay twenty years ago. I published it here for the first time six years ago. This Mother’s Day, I share it again.) *** I married when I was forty. It was amazing at that age how many people asked me if we were going to have children. No, I’d say, We’re not …
Facing Reality
My latest novel, SISTERS, SECRETS, AND THE JUNIOR PROM, is set in high school in 1969, which, by sheer coincidence, is where I happened to be in 1969. The book is fiction. Untrue. Made up. Has no basis in reality. Except, of course, like all fiction, pieces of my life weave in and out of …
My Acapulco Admirer
Ages and ages ago, when I was about twenty, I went on a bargain vacation to Mexico. A high school friend was attending college there, and she found a cheap hotel and I found a cheap airfare, and I met her over Christmas break for a week in Acapulco. I had never traveled alone before …
Losing Control
This week the carpenter came to do some repairs. The dogs did their typical thing. Theo was all over the carpenter, insisting on attention and constant petting. Henry stood four feet behind the guy, barking his silly protective head off. Which one was annoying? Both, of course. Too much love gets in the way of …
Poetry And Poverty
Louise Gluck has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I am familiar with the name. I had to re-familiarize myself with her poetry. Life moves from poetry to prose. In high school and college, Poetry saturated me. I have been searching for a better word than saturate. But that’s the one. Poetry surrounded me …
Expertise
As I was trying on outfits the other day – for God knows what reason, I have nowhere on earth to go – a sweet memory surfaced – also from God knows where. I attended a parochial grammar school, where I wore the typical Catholic school uniform. Navy jumper, white blouse, little navy bowtie. Oh …
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