MY MOTHER’S STORY
In A Patchwork Memoir I wrote:
My grandmother Edith—I called her “Granny”—was raised on a farm with fruit orchards near Sonoma. Her father died of TB when she was little, and her mother never married again, saying…
BETRAYAL
As I mentioned before, I had a huge crush on my homeroom teacher, Mr. Anderson. Besides being handsome and funny, another thing I liked about him was that we had serious discussions in his American history class. One of these end-of-the-day discussions prompted me to...
ASSAULT
Once my mother had demonstrated to my father that she was utterly indifferent to his feelings—breaking her promise never to take us out of state—he felt no compunction about treating her in kind, neither of them seeming to care how their manifest animosity towards...
GOODYCAT
Since child abuse has been an issue in my life, many years ago I wrote a story called Goodycat. I only drew a few illustrations before I decided that the story, as written, was too dark for young children.The two drawings above, plus the illustration I sent to Maurice Sendak…
MAZE
A few years ago I read Joan Brady’s auto-biography, The Unmaking of a Dancer—her account of how her mother destroyed her dream of becoming a ballerina. I identified with her so much, I considered calling one of my vignettes “The Unmaking of…
SERENADE
Two years ago on May 1st, I wrote the following blog: Yesterday was my birthday. At noon, I decided to treat the day like any other Monday and go swimming at the Plunge, where my mom used to swim as a child. One day several years ago I drove all the way to Point...