We meet mom’s friend Helga for dinner at the Croatian guy Tony’s new restaurant and sit inside at the best table (“without shadows,” Tony says). It’s called Adriatic cuisine, which I take to mean Mediterranean, though my geography and culinary… Read More ›
spirituality
Everything we have we’ll lose
When you say goodbye to someone you love it’s a knife’s edge between the past and present. They are both with you and not. It can feel like the amputee’s phantom limb or Schrödinger’s cat, the seam between seasons when… Read More ›
In defense of things
Dawn’s mom Beth is moving out of her house and downsizing to a senior living community. She’s lived in this house since 1982, so it’s a big deal. If memories are like fallen leaves on the ground then the soil… Read More ›
Cordless
The bright red Mickey Mouse socks my kids gave me before the pandemic were now going pink and faded with holes opening at the heels. These socks, like so many things in my life, held small resonance. They meant something… Read More ›
Dream sequence, prayer
In that dream I was walking out of an airport trying to figure out where I’d parked. There were vague signs showing names of gates and parking lots but soon it all got confused and I realized I didn’t know… Read More ›
The meaning of existence can’t be supplied by religion or ideology
Last night’s wood fire still broods, it hangs in the air. I am made older by it, my inability to relate. And the desire to retreat inwards, down a path with no exit and no room to turn around.
The loop
Walking to the lake with Lily and how she seems to grow older with every step, as if it’s happening on this very walk, these new features in her face…and how time bends.
Nowhere else to be
Days the world just settles in around you.
Hello, goodbye
In the dream I had just gotten a sleeve tattoo, like the armor on a teenaged mutant ninja turtle, panes from a tortoise shell, orange and red. And I was walking into the Starbucks corporate office for a new job,… Read More ›
Norwegian wood
He turned bowls made out of reclaimed wood from the dead or fallen trees, the Norwegian maple from a cemetery reformed in the shape of a bowl Dawn picked out; we’d find a special place for it in our home…. Read More ›