HALLOWEEN MAYHEM
Yesterday Ella and I trekked to our temporary storage room in the basement of the building on the other side of the block to retrieve our Halloween decorations—because I wanted to take some photos for my blog. After removing the padlock and stepping inside, we noticed...
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,...
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…
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…
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...
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…