Sitting in my car at midnight on Monday night, outside a Dunkin’ Donuts, on the side of the Grand Central Parkway near LaGuardia Airport, I started thinking about the summer I spent in Hawaii when I was ten.  I spent 7 weeks there that year, living with my Uncle Wallace and his family.  Life with […]

Saturday afternoon, as I was walking over to Scott’s apartment, so that he could finish restoring my computer back to it’s original state, I saw a woman scrubbing her stoop. She was wearing hot pink shorts and a tank top, had short blonde hair and lots of eye make. She was solidly in […]

My mother is a poet who has been in the groove lately. For the last couple of weeks, there hasn’t been a day that has passed without a new email from her bearing the contents of a fresh poem. They’ve been insightful, creative, light-filled and beautiful. As she’s been turning out pieces […]

I went to bed last night with a headache, and when I woke up this morning, it was still with me. I stumbled into work, eyes blearier than usual for a meeting. My go-to headache remedy of caffeine and ibuprofen didn’t make a dent. After the meeting was over, my boss took […]

Saturday night, I dreamt I met a man who was a French chef (he was actually a chef, from France, not just a chef of French food. Why I remember this distinction from the dream, I can not say). He was writing a cookbook and introduced me to his editor while we were […]

Last night I dreamt I was sitting on the floor of a thrift store, in front of a bookshelf. I was looking at children’s books, when I pulled out a manila pocket folder that was tucked in between the tattered editions of Dr. Seuss. I turned the folder upside down, and out poured […]

There is an alley in Old City, between Church and Market, between 2nd and 3rd that is still paved with cobblestones. If you stand towards the end at night and squint your eyes so that the electric lights go fuzzy and don’t turn your head too much, you can imagine that you have left […]

Last night, in the moments before my exhaustion took me down into sleep, I felt like I was surrounded by faces. I had seen so many that night, people who had been my world and my community for years and my brain chose to process them montage-style in the seconds before sleep. When […]

A wing and a view,
originally uploaded by Marusula.
Two weeks ago today was the last day of my Portland vacation. My mom and I spent the day at coast (in Oregon it’s not the shore or the beach). As we drove west on highway 26 in my dad’s zippy (and fuel efficient) little sedan, […]

I used to have a dream of opening up a pizza place in Walla Walla. There’d be five or six beers on tap, pizza by the slice and live music five nights a week. Well, I better get a move on, because according to the New York Times, Walla Walla is the capital […]