- Scary movie

It’s Halloween; I’m alone.
It’s a good time to watch Jesus Camp, a documentary loaned to me weeks ago by my friend David,  a fellow volunteer at GLAD.
“I heard it’s disturbing,” said Eli, when I showed it to him.
Perfect for tonight.
—–
P.S. The photo has nothing to do with the film. It’s simply a snap of the [...]

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- Presentation of self

Once in a while, if someone knows or notices that I wear an insulin pump, that person says to me, “Don’t you love it?”, gushing on the word love.
This happened to me recently, during my annual check-up. I was sitting on the table with a paper gown wrapped around me and talking to my doctor, [...]

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- Convalescence

Lydia came into the bedroom at 7pm last night and said, “Mom, I can tell you kept yourself busy this morning.”
“You can?” It was so sweet of her to know how I operate.
“Yeah,” she replied. “You never fold my clothes.”
She was right. Yesterday morning I busily and methodically went through the house, making beds, folding [...]

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- Incomprehensible

The June 13th issue of The Economist is on the kitchen table, and Grace, who loves magazine covers, is examining it. I’m puttering around the kitchen. She asks, finally, “What does it mean?” So I lean over her shoulder and take a stab at explaining the visual metaphor: “Right now, the world is experiencing huge [...]

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- Terra firma

That really is the phrase that goes through one’s mind, joyously, after one has spent a few hours on a small boat, commandeered by an arrogant captain, with 90 other passengers who are gripping their stomachs, wincing, weeping, and eventually puking into garbage bags as the boat made its way out of Provincetown Harbor and [...]

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- Number one fear?

For weeks, Grace has been preparing for her animal research project, which is the culmination of the second grade curriculum. Out in the garage, with the door open, she constructed over many days a diorama that featured the elephant seals’ habitat. In the basement, on the kids’ computer, she searched Google for “elephant [...]

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- Before coffee

I like talking to Leslie Sills, my daughter Grace’s art teacher, about process. She’s a sculptor and a writer, so inevitably we get to how making objects and making prose are alike, and unlike.
Once, in a discussion on finding time to do self-generated work, amidst teaching and other commitments, Leslie said, “Before coffee.”
“What?”
She elaborated: “I [...]

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- Garden for our times

Do you remember the walled, overgrown garden brought back to life by a boy and a girl in F. H. Burnett’s Secret Garden (1911)? The book was a favorite of my childhood, and perhaps the long, restorative story about gardening has something to do with my own attraction to shabby, abandoned patches, as if glory and [...]

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- Being there

On Thursday, a new student, M., came in to the Writing Center for the first time. She had an assignment from her criminal justice class on the rule of law that she “just couldn’t start.” I sat next to her at the computer as she did the first thing: locate a definition [...]

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- Blank page fear

This is the view from my kitchen window. Besides the neighbor’s row of junipers and our drooping hostas, this is the least planted spot in the yard. In the eight years we’ve lived here, since we took down a rotted white picket fence along the back and dug out clots of brush, I’ve [...]

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