Thirty-one years ago the film Pretty in Pink came out. We watched it on Netflix but didn’t remember anything: not Andrew McCarthy’s flickering eyes, nor Molly Ringwald’s quivering lips. Nor the scene with the two of them in a library… Read More ›
The Smiths
“In the midst of life we are in debt, et cetera”
Wednesday, that day time slows every week, with Lily on a late-start for school, the possibility we could all sleep in until 7:30 but never do, a day I work from home with Charlotte on early release, meaning she gets… Read More ›
‘There is a light that never goes out’
I lay in a hot bath but the seal in the stopper leaked and the water went down (and I with it, too): and once under- neath the tub I looked up at a light the shape of a ring coming… Read More ›
November spawned a monster
Rainy Thursday morning, Thanksgiving at the lake, all to myself. The level’s come up to the rocks, nowhere to sit. Ginger has a private crap somewhere in the trees. The rain makes a pattern across the surface, little black dots rippling,… Read More ›
This time of year the mountains
When the girl at the Whole Foods asked how my day was going I paused and had to laugh, how much I wanted her to know, she should read my blog. Leaving the office at 2 PM and stopping for… Read More ›
Deep impression by a shallow pool
Gray smear of a Saturday too wet for yard work, it still seems everyone’s gone since the Fourth. You can hear a car engine coming a way’s away, they cut arcs around the bend and go in and out like… Read More ›
Rattle my bones all over the stones
Saturday, all of us on damp streets swaddled against the wind coming off Dublin Bay, wandering northeast from our flat past large churches, intersections where the asphalt’s painted LOOK RIGHT, LOOK LEFT, and the people have complexions that remind me… Read More ›
‘Strangeways, here we come’
When I lent Benny’s dad Christoph a book on German history and explained the author’s premise, that too much focus had been placed on the Hitler years, he said that’s because no one told them what happened, no one talked… Read More ›
Meet me at the cemetry gates
We dropped the kids off for their first day of German school, their first class French — French taught in German — and I walked to the cemetery by the Realschule, where we’ve started our third week of German classes,… Read More ›
“Helpless”
I don’t think my parents liked me having the bedroom door closed when Marie was over, but it wasn’t tightly enforced. We closed the door and smiled at each other: there wasn’t anywhere else to sit in my room, just… Read More ›