- I would read a book about pencils.

For some reason, Grace, Jimmy, and I were talking about single-noun-subject books. What concrete thing interests you enough that you would read or write an entire book about it? Salt, for example.
Grace raised potatoes as a possibility.
“Pencils,” I said. “I love pencils. I would read an entire book about pencils.”
Yesterday, my library helpers found and [...]

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- Freaks, inside or out

In The Family Stone, a movie that Jimmy and I saw together and (dis)liked differently, the Luke Wilson character exhorts the straight-laced Sarah Jessica Parker character to fly her “freak flag.” Yeah, I loved that. I also cried when the Diane Keaton character died.
In praise of freaks of all kinds (and aren’t you, whether secretly [...]

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- Writing in bed

I am reclining with the heating pad under my shoulder. It’s only 7 o’clock in the evening. With me is also Everyman, which I am finishing, and my iBook.
Jimmy walks in and says to me, “You know, a lot of writers wrote in bed.”
“Really?” I ask, which does not express doubt, but is just the [...]

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- Big books

It’s a few minutes before the girls have to leave for school, and Grace is gathering her accoutrement: ponytail holder, socks, a tattered bag of yarn.  She also plunks down a pile of books.  I wonder how she’ll get all this into her pouch and up the hill to school.
I ask, “Why so many books? [...]

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- Inbound worshipers

This morning at 8am I was stopped by a red light at the mouth of a side street that feeds into Commonwealth Avenue.  A gas station on my right; a BU building across the street and train tracks.  Me? Daydreaming, waiting.  An MBTA bus, the 57, zoomed past, heading east into the city.  People were [...]

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- I am Sarah Palin

When I was in college, at one of the Seven Sisters in the mid-1980s, meals were served in the dormitories by kitchen staff who were longtime employees of the college. This was before the big contractors, like Aramark, took over dining services everywhere. We knew our cook, Charlie his name was, and dinners were [...]

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- Images

I love the images in these two lines, from two different pieces:
All over the room, like boats softly tooting their horns in a harbor on a foggy night, men were weeping. (Nicholas Dawidoff, “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” New York Times, Sunday, June 15, 2008)
and
At times I was lonely, but it was a bearable loneliness, [...]

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- Rocks

Grace came home with these the other day; she calls them heart rocks.

Like me, she keeps her head down sometimes, looking for rocks. What, exactly, are we looking for in a rock? There are millions on the beach. Still, a few seem to call out to us: “Pick me, pick me!” [...]

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- Trees

This link takes you to a moving short piece on NPR by Julie Zickafoose, called “The First Cut Is the Deepest,” about her response when a neighbor decides to cut down a big, sheltering tulip tree that provides privacy between her land and his. My sister Emily, who wrote to me today about her [...]

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- Hazards of reading

This is an approximation of a conversation I had with Grace recently. While I did not invent her remarks, I did cut out some of the repetition. There also were a lot of thoughtful pauses I have eliminated.

Grace: How old do you think you’ll be when you die?
Jane: Old, I hope.
Grace: Who do [...]

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