It feels like it’s time to take down the Day of the Dead altar. I am not aware of any hard and fast rule about this, but just last night as I added more wood to the fire and glanced up at the mantle, I had the distinct impression that things had to change. The [...]
I am flummoxed, having just read the New York Times article about Amy Winehouse’s recent death. The end of the article states, Ms. Winehouse is not the first singer who died at the age of 27. Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones were the same age. [...]
It’s early in the morning and you’re busy getting your children ready for school. They are mostly cooperative, but one of them is moving very slowly and instead really wants to tell you about her dream. What do you do? Maybe you’re a teacher, working with a small group of students who are writing stories. [...]
I have two poems to offer this year: an invocation by Leonard Cohen, and an elegy by Rumi. Both of these I read at my nephew’s funeral last Fall. Both I think deserve wider reading. So here they are, in honor of Brigid, the poet’s muse. May the light return to us all. – Holy [...]
I was explaining to my teenage daughter yesterday what a tough year 2010 was for most people, by way of an example from our own life. Here we were, driving on the freeway in my old Honda, heading down to San Francisco. On the back window of my car was a big white “11″ on [...]
It has been a very difficult month, and my inner and outer dialogues have circled around questions that are essentially unanswerable. Why do some kids make it and others don’t? Some people do stupid stuff for years and survive, others don’t have that kind of luck. It seems entirely random who lives and who dies. There [...]
The hardest thing I have ever done ended today with the most difficult phone call I have ever made: telling my niece that her brother, my nephew Alex, died last night of an accidental overdose, at age 27. Alex’s life was never easy. As an infant, he had a cry that was already raging at [...]
I have just spent an hour watching the excellent Rachel Maddow interview people about the public health disaster unfolding in Port au Prince. Once the visual shock of some of the images registered—the wounded lined up in the hallways and parking lots of barely functioning hospitals, the man lying on the ground whose IV had run [...]
I did not buy my home on my own. It was bought several years ago by my then-husband and me, as we looked to the future and decided that we wanted a house on the California coast to retire to. We got a fixer for a great price, and spent the next couple of years [...]
Saturday I spent a few hours prepping my hallway for painting. The color had been chosen over a year ago, the paint bought back in December, but for some reason I had not yet gotten around to the project. It is a small T-shaped hallway, no bigger than a closet really, with a total of [...]
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