When I was small and days were most often spent with just the two of us, my mother and me, filling time as we pleased, I spent countless hours in parks and museums, wandering aimlessly and looking at trees, art, and artifacts. Our most frequent haunt was the Brooks Museum, where my mother liked to … Continue reading How art might save the world.
It's thankfulness season, time for the annual spilling of gratitude that began mid-month and will end when a wave of resolutions takes over, as if gratitude must be bound by beginning and end points. I don't mean to sound cynical. Certainly I have many things to be thankful for. Among my many blessings - beyond … Continue reading The way we were.
A little more than a year ago, I started a new job, taking the helm of a well-established but fragile nonprofit agency dedicated to ending family violence. Someday I'm going to write about the experience; but today isn't that day. Today I have something else in mind, keeping with the theme of sifting and sorting … Continue reading A few notes: October 2017
Now here we are at summer's sun-stand, the long solstice (in the northern hemisphere, anyway) of June, fruit of a cycle born six months ago at the onset of winter. It's still an anything-can-happen era with a why-the-hell-not vibe. It's the time to ask, again: If not now, then when?
For the past few weeks I've been in the good company of more than 200 million people around the world, all of us still hearing the lingering echoes of John B. McLemore and Brian Reed, seeing ghost images of clocks and sundials and tattoos, and a maze.... As you know either very well or not … Continue reading Not tedious, but brief.
I know a mama who is terrified of sending her first-born child to college. Also, she is overjoyed - though, these are not the words she uses. These precise words belong to someone else (we'll get to that), but they apply here, too. I ran into her, this mama, several weeks ago at the neighborhood … Continue reading Beside ourselves.
There are few, if any, things as full of pure joy as the squeals of bubbly delight from a baby playing peek-a-boo. When my son was little, long before he could walk, this was an instant and endless source of entertainment, closing my hands over my face, opening them like doors, and saying, "peek-a-boo; I … Continue reading Look, now.
In 1975 an ad agency secretary wrote a song that has been in my head for the past several days. I can't shake it. You may have learned this song, too, if you and I are in a similar age bracket and your parents, like mine, let you watch TV on Saturday mornings when you … Continue reading Sing it loud.
