- Chaperone

Haight Street in San Francisco is just one long strip of shops and cafés. In America, we seem to put more energy into commercial diversity than we do into the human kind.
Along the strip, Lydia and Grace pulled me into store after store. They did not need to use physical force, like the hand yank [...]

Read Full Post »

- Cupcakes and life

At 9:40pm, Jimmy is folding laundry and playing dj. It’s Prince: “I Would Die 4 U,” “Raspberry Beret,” and “When Doves Cry.” Eli is out. I am putting away my sorted clothes, and Lydia and Grace are hanging out with us. As usual, the children introduce conversational threads out of nowhere.
Lydia:  When we go to [...]

Read Full Post »

- 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 [...]

Read Full Post »

- Mother/daughter moments

1.
Our upstairs bathroom, early in the day. Jane leans over sink, face close to mirror. Lydia stands nearby.
Lydia: Since when did you wear mascara?
Jane: Since Adam’s Bar Mitzvah.
Lydia rolls her eyes as a first response. Jane keeps doing what she’s doing.
Lydia: Um, why?
Jane: So I look more alert.
Lydia widens her eyes, narrows them, and breathes [...]

Read Full Post »

- More or less functional

Many years ago, some Kokernak family conversation was being had, and this exchange between my father and my sister Emily occurred:
Dad: Do you think our family is dysfunctional?
Emily: Well… it’s more or less functional.
I don’t remember which function was the topic of concern (perhaps all the times my father threatened, when we were misbehaving in [...]

Read Full Post »

- Lice removal machine

Jimmy found some archival videos from an earlier time in our children’s lives when lice seemed to be visiting in regular waves. I hosted them on my head, too, more than once. I itched, and the girls diagnosed me. Here’s one of those lost moments:

Incidentally, the video captures a scene in [...]

Read Full Post »

- One way to pass time

This is what Grace said, in sequential increments, after I gently asked her to stop reading over my shoulder:
I am just going to lie down on the couch…
and use my mind…
to keep busy…
and make objects move…
and race across the room…
and watch them.
And so I watched eight-year-old Grace, and that indeed is what she seemed to [...]

Read Full Post »

- All facts

I am a slow eater. Or, perhaps I live with fast ones.
At dinner, I said to the kids, “Slow down, slow down.”
I added, “I just read that people who eat fast are two times more likely to be overweight than people who don’t.”
Lydia: “You read that? Where?”
Jane: “Yes. In my Diabetes Forecast.”
Lydia: “So, it’s a [...]

Read Full Post »

- Eye of the family storm

In the fall of 2004, I participated in a faculty development workshop at Simmons College, where I then worked and taught, on the teaching of writing. There were about 15 of us, and it was led by Lowry Pei and it was great. We got together weekly, we talked about students (in general, not gossipy), [...]

Read Full Post »

- Day one: salute

These flags, marking the plain graves of veterans in our local cemetery, seem to me to be like the first bulbs of spring, in a way, pushing through as winter hangs on. They remind us to persevere, and look ahead.
I know, I know, my metaphor does not work perfectly, and yet no metaphor does. Still, [...]

Read Full Post »