I keep a journal. It’s a physical one, usually just a spiral notebook, that I scribble in with a pen. Most of the entries are snippets from books. The journal is where I collect ideas or turns of phrase that I want to revisit. I also sporadically use it to record details from my nighttime […]
Thanksgiving in the Desert
Home from Thanksgiving travel. My family has a decades-long tradition of spending Thanksgiving in Palm Springs. If you know me from elementary school, or summer camp, or college, or any other time, you may know about this tradition. My family likes traditions. There are traditional parts of our tradition (duh?), like three, or in some […]
Words In Air
My husband and I mostly had a long distance, international, pre-Internet courtship. We wrote a lot of letters, and I have boxes of them still. One of my retirement projects will be to organize, scan, assemble, and annotate. I’m a romantic about letters. Thus, I fell in love with Words in Air. The book contains […]
Since When?
I recently shared a story about Halloween my freshman year of college. I like thinking about those good old days. I made lifelong friends. I am grateful for those friendships every day. Did I get a good education? Maybe. If I didn’t, I own my young-person’s choices. Because, as I have quoted elsewhere on this […]
Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist
I binged on two of Roxane Gay’s books: Bad Feminist and Hunger. Bad Feminist was wise. Hunger was shocking, in an impressively plainspoken way. The essay in Bad Feminist that moved me to post was “Typical First Year Professor.” This incident, in particular: When I was a student listening to a boring professor drone endlessly, […]
Countdown to Halloween: She’s a Scarecrow
Here is one of my favorite memories of one of my favorite people. And, yes, it involves Halloween. I went to college at Harvard. Freshman year, a girl who lived across the hall from me woke up on Halloween, got dressed up as a scarecrow like it was the most natural thing in the world, […]
Countdown to Halloween: I’m a Tiger
Our sons make our job very hard. You know, the job of all parents: to embarrass their children. Our sons seem to be immune to embarrassment. Four years ago, when our older son was a freshman in college, the President of his college came to Boulder for a parent and alumni event. Here are Jim […]
Countdown to Halloween: I’m a Zebra
Halloween is next week! I love Halloween. I always have. One of my favorite Halloween memories is creating the three-person purple dragon costume with twin friends. Here’s another memory I like, starring one of my sons. When our son was two, he declared he wanted to be a hot dog for Halloween. See picture below. […]