We have a 1998 Dodge Grand Caravan. It has a cassette player. Like some of us around here, it is showing its age. It did get a new battery this year, and we figured that would be the van’s last battery. Still, one day this week, the van wouldn’t start. The van feels like a […]

This is a true story. It happened twenty years ago, but this is how I remember it. I was a graduate student at Stanford. We lived in student housing on campus. Jim was teaching at Burlingame High School. He usually took the CalTrain to work instead of fighting the traffic on the 101. We had […]

“Listen,” you say, and you pause, like, “I’m trying to figure out how to phrase this.” That’s when I pull out the thick skin, the kind women always keep tied around their waists like an extra flannel shirt, ready to throw on before meetings or rape trials, or walking down the street, or making small-talk […]

This is a picture of me and my sister. I’m on the left. I am VERY happy. Maybe you can tell from the picture, or maybe it just looks like a garden-variety happy kid picture. Not garden-variety at all. Finger puppets, people. I’m not so sure about my sister. She doesn’t seem unhappy to me, […]

This picture is what I think of when I hear “mama bear.” (Shout out to pixabay for the CC0 license for the image.) The mama bear has her baby. She loves her baby. But, after all, she is a bear, so if someone messes with her baby, watch out. The mama bear is my spirit […]

Summer! What’s better than watching Netflix in the cool basement? DH and I recently finished Breaking Bad. Now we are on to Mad Men. Of course I had heard about this show, and the Don Draper character. But I wasn’t expecting to have a crush on Don Draper! Last night he said to Betty, “you […]

Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No or waiting for their hair to grow. Everyone is just waiting. […]

I attended summer camp from a very early age. When I became a counselor at camp, I got to see some of the behind-the-scenes activities in the operation. One of those activities was the camp director’s pep talk (or, perhaps, the reading of the riot act) the night before Visiting Day. On Visiting Day, parents, […]