A few weeks ago LittleMan requested baked potatoes for dinner, and I realized with some horror that while I have made all manner of potatoes in my time, from smashed to hassleback to scalloped, I could not recall ever making just plain-old baked potatoes. Like, I literally didn't know how long to bake those suckers. But it's rare for my kids to request specific side dishes, so I got some russets and washed them and pierced them and set about figuring it out. There is a first time for everything. **** When I was a little girl my mom made baked potatoes a lot. There were four of us, but ... [READ MORE]
Sit Down, Look Up
April 14, 2021 by Leave a Comment
I am revisiting Anne Lamott's Almost Everything : Notes on Hope, a gift from a friend back in 2019 that's been sitting on my nightstand ever since. It's a short read, but a lively, incisive, and meaningful one, so after I finished I turned to page one to start all over again. As long as we are living the same, strange day over and over, I might as well read the same, wonderful book. When I left my full-time job back in June 2019, the idea was to write more, to see where this sporadic, 11-year exercise in putting pen to paper might lead if I actually committed to it rather than squeezing ... [READ MORE]
Missing
January 12, 2021 by Leave a Comment
I'm sitting here at the dining room table, and there are things to do (two bags of groceries to unpack, thank you notes to write, an overdue doctor's appointment to schedule, a 20-minute yoga video, a few emails, plus Babygirl is about to be on break from Zoom and she will want a snack and she will need to know what the PLAN is for the after-school hours...) but instead of tackling these items as I had intended, I'm kind of paralyzed. For one thing, it just started raining, unexpectedly, which is throwing a wrench in the aforementioned after-school planning (see : outdoor activities ... [READ MORE]
Ferries
October 15, 2020 by Leave a Comment
It's mid-October and it's glorious in San Francisco. A pre-Halloween heat wave bakes the city during the day, but early sunsets mean cool evenings and mornings. The skies are impossibly blue, cloudless. The outdoor dining popping up everywhere is full -- almost uncomfortably, perhaps slightly dangerously full, but also a welcome sign of life in a place that was, for a time, unrecognizably and apocalyptically closed. To anyone from anywhere else it would feel like summer, but here by the Bay these short, warm days speak undeniably of Fall. Anticipation. My sister and I ... [READ MORE]
wordplay
September 15, 2020 by Leave a Comment
Here's what I can't stop thinking about : Tension // Intention. I can't shake the homophonous connection, so I looked it up, and lo, there is a root share. It's tendere (shoutout to my fellow #wordnerds), which deals with straining, effort, pull, and push. Anyway, I find it compelling that the root of intention -- which has lately been co-opted into the arena of yoga, journals, and clean eating; in other words, peacefulness and wholeness -- is, at the end of the day, about strain. I've been setting a lot of intentions lately. You know what? Intentions aren't easy. They are my ... [READ MORE]
Nostalgia, A Funny Bird
May 1, 2020 by 2 Comments
Photo by Babygirl, April 2020 In my mind, this is the moment: when LittleMan was taking his first steps, and he was in the diaper with the brown t-shirt of unknown provenance (though it meant something then, those 11 years ago), and the parrots were on the deck, and he was pressed against the glass, and we had the video camera going, and it was amazing. Except, no. This is how things get conflated. This was, like, seven different things that I somehow, in my nostalgia, managed to converge into one, perfect memory...and it was none of those things. Littleman took his first, careful ... [READ MORE]
Small Moment
January 5, 2018 by Leave a Comment
The kids have this writing curriculum at their school in which every year begins with "small moments". As a writer I get this: the moment begets the scene, which begets the idea, which begets the plot and so on. (I love this about their school.) If the blog died a quiet death in 2017 it wasn't for lack of small moments. It was because those moments weren't mine. The year belonged to other people. Other people's battles. Other people's pain. Other people's triumphs. The false starts and the great, big, smiling, deep, breaths. I was a bystander, and a support system. I ... [READ MORE]
