the latest posts tagged ‘stepmother’
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…
Totally Random Crap
Clutter. There are scraps and fragments everywhere, in oddly named computer files on my iMac, scrawled in pencil on the backs of envelopes and Albertson’s receipts, scratchy voice memos on my iPhone. Reminders of things I should do (or should have done, whoops), dates to put on the calendar, ideas for blog posts. I had…
Coming Clean
It’s an almost-cold morning. Gauzy fog the color of thin milk hangs in the canyons, brightened in the east by a 40-watt fluorescent sun. The elm outside my office has half its leaves, yellow as old newspaper, tattered webs minus spiders, waiting for the first stiff storm to whoosh it all off, sodden, into courtyard…
A Bad Muthah Truckah
You know you’ve been on the road too long and too often when your daughter sends you an email with the subject “For you long-haul truckers” and this link — http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/travel/14practraffic.html?hpw – and you reply to inform her that you already use the best of the apps described in the article. This quick post perhaps…
Moving On
Roads, belts of asphalt or concrete, arrow straight or curly as a grapevine, they slip and wriggle through mountains, vectoring the view, and slash true as a blade on the flats, the shortest distance between two points, city to country to town and back. We drove from San Diego to Bethesda in 1954 with my…