INHUMANE

INHUMANE

When I was four, we moved to New Haven for a year so my dad could get his Ph.D. in philosophy at Yale. Doug and I went to an all-day preschool run by three black women. I loved Miss Green, while Doug’s favorite was Miss Brown. For the first months back in Minnesota,...

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ILLUMINED

ILLUMINED

And speaking of Lake Anza, in A Patchwork Memoir I wrote about another outing with Arielle, after Michael was born:

Leia and I are bundling Arielle, Michael, and all the lake gear into the car (which has got to be 150 degrees inside)—not a small…

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HYPOCHONDRIAC

HYPOCHONDRIAC

It’s September and we’re in the middle of a heat wave—not unusual for Berkeley this time of year. I only mention this because when I went to the pool on Friday, I found it closed—a change in the fall schedule I’d forgotten about. But before I could lament my memory lapse…

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DARK SECRET

DARK SECRET

  I love this picture of my mom and me. She was twenty-five when I was born and couldn’t have looked more glamorous, in my humble opinion. She’d married my dad the year before, after meeting him at a hospital in California where she was stationed as a WAC...

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REFLECTION

In my April 5th blog, “Catastrophe,” I describe how my brother’s face got burned when he was six months old—and why I felt responsible for his injury. Years later, I had the following nightmare that I first wrote about in A Patchwork Memoir:
Last night I dreamed I was standing looking at myself in a mirror. I had some sort of stick in my hand, which I brandished like a baseball bat, then tugged at my crotch the way ballplayers do. The next moment I noticed with embarrassment that…

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ENERGIZER BUNNY

ENERGIZER BUNNY

Rummaging through more of my boxes the other day, I came across a baggy with fold-dye—as opposed to tie-dye—art I made with my godkids when they were younger. Actually, I cautiously introduced Arielle to the technique when she was only two. That was the year I was...

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