the latest posts tagged ‘margery mann’
a man of letters
Our family is chock-full of wordy people. We soak language up and spit it out in big lots, out loud and on paper. We communicate, chirping like a flock of finches in an elm, scratching or tapping letters into sentences and stories, leaving our verbal footprints around as if we’d landed in black paint…
a rock and roll band’s child of god
There was an eclectic soup of people at my stepmother’s memorial fête last November in Carmel: the last of her old Friends For Life, a handful of family, dozens of sad pals who had loved her for decades, a couple oblivious hangers-on, a few furtive cranks gossiping in the back over the cheese about…
still tilting at windmills
When my stepmother Margery died last year, we rescued Don Quixote from the scrap heap in Carmel and brought him to San Diego where he greets visitors at Casa de Swell. He’s a little unsteady from his years scaring deer outside MMM’s house, rust having disconnected his legs from his feet. His…
She Slipped Away
early ‘sixties? 1985, with Bill 2008 If such a netherworld exists, Marge and Bill are having an exquisite reunion on a warm late summer afternoon with Claudia and John at the house across the ford at Big Sur Creek. All their old friends are there — Barbara Brown, Hugh and Kitty, the two Dorotheas, Sue,…
She Wore a Lapis Lazuli Necklace
Long, strong legs and arms, tan and storkily elegant, high heels, an exotic orange, yellow and blue scarf tied as a headband across her forehead, clamping down an unruly goldenbrown mane, thickly noncompliant. Brassy ear hoops, chunks of ethnic somethings in a necklace or two, blue Nordic eyes, coral lipstick. Swooping through the curves on…
An Extraordinary Act of Love
He refused medical treatment, knowing that the cancer growing at the back of his tongue, in his throat, would kill him. No one could say how long he would live (six months, as it turned out). None of us would say, not in full sentences anyway, the effect the cancer would have (… narrowed airway…