If you’re not familiar with poker, the thing to understand is that you start a hand with some cards of your own, and you don’t yet know what other cards will be available to you to use in that hand. You have to “sign up” to play that hand by putting some money in the …
I’ve been keeping journals since I was six years old. That first diary is a real gem, with one-sentence entries like: “Today I went crazy and thawt I was a frog.” I wish I remembered the story behind that… The trouble with keeping journals, though, has always been the fact that when you have the …
Thirty-five years ago today, my mother employed her primary Superpower and made a person. A day or two later I was introduced to a lifetime companion and playmate and co-conspirator and friend: my sister Karin. (She guides people’s pronunciation with this clue: “You park a KAR-in the garage.”) I turned three just a few weeks …
My “Radio Silence” over the last week is (I’m happy to say) the result of having been quite thoroughly engrossed in the activities of a first-week-of-summer-holidays with the kids… I started to write a few times, but never got as far as hitting “Publish,” so here it is, all at once… Sat, June 2: Summer …
“She’s not really mine to give away anymore,” the bride’s father said to me this afternoon, as we waited in the back yard for her to complete her transformation from jeans-and-flannel to white lace. “But I’d like to.” Adding the note to my scribbled-in Baker’s Wedding Handbook, I assured him with a grin that he …
Tricia Mitchell just posted a lovely blog about the castle in Heidelberg, Germany–accompanied by some of her own photos and memories of this castle over the years, and posing the question of whether her readers had memories to share. I wrote to her that although it’s been almost three decades since I’ve been there (and although I …
A blogging-friend commented the other day that my writing reminds her of another writer’s, and (with that sense of shame peculiar to a bibliophile when she discovers there’s something she hasn’t read) I immediately downloaded Anne LaMott’s Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith. The action of downloading the book brought home to me, actually, how …
