TRAPEZE ARTISTS
One morning—I no longer remember the date—I was rereading Karin Fisher-Golton’s charming Amazing May blogs about gratitude and felt prompted to write about something, besides penicillin and the internet, that I’m grateful for:
CELESTE
Celeste was a friend of my mother’s—a social-worker colleague at Herrick Hospital. My first impression of her when I met her at a party she threw was of coldness. But then my mother told me a story Celeste had confided in her about her troubled first marriage to an army officer…
MY OFFICE
The Art Office was at the most remote corner of the Art Complex, which was the farthest outpost of the eucalyptus-shaded campus. It was a long, narrow, but cozy room, with wooden walls, an Oriental carpet runner covering the floor, and a window seat below a lengthy...
BLEAK JOURNEY
When I'd felt everything was falling apart, I'd moved in with Celeste, a friend of my mother's who was renovating an old Victorian house with extra bedrooms she wanted to rent out. (As psychiatric social workers, she and my mom were working together at Herrick...
SNOWMAN
Seely let herself in stealthily with the key she had kept, glanced around, then set the electric blanket she’d borrowed on the raunchy old pelt on his bed. As she stood before it, she envisioned his sleepy Pan face, swathed in bedclothes. And suddenly there it was...
DANCE-AWAY
They sat across from each other at the dining room table just as they had the first afternoon he told her he loved her. When he said he was so busy he couldn’t make much time for her, she wasn’t surprised, only wondered why he thought it was necessary to state the...