If the ‘50s was not a shining moment in human history, the decade at least landed us with an abundance of game shows. Truth or Consequences, The Price Is Right, Queen for a Day, and a few years later, Let’s Make a Deal. These were the four that played at our house, and I considered it daytime TV at its finest. How I became a game show aficionado puzzled me...
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The story goes that when my father’s parents divorced when he was eight, the reason given was not infidelity, moral lassitude, or drunkenness, but messiness. Theirs was an example of the inability of two people to share a life when one was messy and one was neat. There are many apocryphal stories in my family and this may be one of them, but I suspect...
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Every summer I make a pilgrimage to New England where I did some of my growing up. In a rented car I drive the familiar roads of Massachusetts and Maine, reacquainting myself with humidity and the color green. The farther north I go the fewer people there are, and along the coast the air cools and becomes salty. I don’t pull off the highway to find a bowl...
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When I was a chubby five-year-old in puffed sleeves and shiny red shoes, and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I had one answer: I want to be famous. I had learned not to say I wanted to be a fireman. Everyone laughed at that. But I couldn’t say what people expected, a teacher or a nurse. I didn’t want to be a teacher or a nurse. My first...
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Here, two big winter storms brought a few trees down. The grass is lush and the ferns my mother planted have grown in and spread along the new drainage ditch. The place looks cared for, as my parents used to care for it. The driveway has a fresh load of gravel and the house a new coat of paint. I got here last night and even in the dark I could sense the...
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If you’ve never listened to the Hot Country Knights singing “Pick Her Up,” you may not be interested in reading any further because this Letter From Home is basically a paean to pickup trucks, including the lyrics they inspire. An example of this brilliance is: “If you wanna do right on a Saturday night/This is all you’ve gotta do/…Pick her up in a pickup...
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Ever since reading Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, I’ve approached the art of the passeggiata with a new sense of awe. Far from being a simple feat of forward movement, a stroll is an act of discovery, a gourmet meal of the senses. We prowl and sniff and stop and listen and sniff again, just like the four-footers we know. Sometimes we’re purposeful,...
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When I was a kid and admittedly a little on the self-centered side, I thought I would someday write an advice column for my hometown newspaper, the New York Times. I decided I would call it Dear Me, ME being my initials. The cleverness of that faded over time, as did the ambition to give anyone anywhere advice. But now I’m back at it, though you won’t find...
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As a kid, nothing pleased me more than to hear a grownup cut loose with a volley of curse words. I was an East Coast city girl; we didn’t say “cussing.” We said “swearing” but that was confusing because sometimes you were meant to swear, to promise you weren’t the one who made the crank calls to the elderly neighbor or clogged the toilet with paper towels....
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Good morning from the parking lot behind Darling’s Auto in Augusta, Maine where I’ve spent the night in fetal position on the back seat of my electric vehicle, waiting the required seven hours for it to charge. Oh, it’s a wonder, this new form of transportation. Drive awhile, wait awhile; drive and charge, drive and charge. What’s time to a weary traveler?...
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My grandfather was a slender man with a high forehead and immaculate hands. He was a fly fisherman, and the reason we didn’t see him often was because he fished all over the world instead of staying home in Connecticut with his family. My father was his son. My father wasn’t a slender man; he was of normal bulk and had a full head of hair. His hands...
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When I was a freshman in college, I decided to memorize “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It was a weird year for me. I was living in a converted lounge, the best the formerly all-male college could do to accommodate its new female students. My dorm room had a beige linoleum floor, stark white walls, no windows, and two bunk beds placed randomly in...
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It’s been 270 million years since Flagstaff might have advertised itself as a beach destination. Not the kind with vendors and umbrellas, boardwalks and roller bladers, people large and small squirming with sunburn and spilling out of their swimsuits. No humans—no mammals at all—no birds, not even dinosaurs roamed these shores. The ocean’s evidence is...
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My first day in prison went better than I expected. The guards were patient with me, even when I was stuck for several minutes in a sort of no man’s land between two heavy doors, a security zone with cameras set too high to record the presence of a five-foot tall person. It took some jumping and waving on my part to activate the inside door, and by then I...
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The story goes that my sister Julia, newly arrived at UC Santa Cruz, was sitting in class on the afternoon of October 17, 1989, when the ground began to tremble. The class was a large lecture class and Julia watched in amazement as dozens of her fellow PhD students jumped up from their seats and ran for the doorways. Believing it was nothing but the rumble...
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I missed a big chunk of first grade because I was laid up with tuberculosis. As a result, by the time I hit second grade I could barely write my name. Everyone else in the class, I noticed, published themselves every chance they got. In blocky letters they scrawled their names across the blackboard, chalked them on the benches in the playground and on the...
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Often our partings are so frequent and casual we don’t even consider the weight of goodbye. Until the bed is empty, the pills and liquid morphine taken to the police station to be destroyed. Easier to comprehend the finality of medicine than the finishing of a human life. Today is my 70th birthday. Today I pass out of the tenuous grip of late middle age....
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The man was dressed in stiff new Carhartt’s, a red flannel shirt and sheepskin vest. At his feet lay a mutt of disputable parentage—part pointer dog, part pit bull, a smattering of Labrador retriever. She lay uncomfortably, which I noticed was due to a bloated belly. Her large brown eyes were misty with cataracts, her soft muzzle tested the air. As I came...
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When I first arrived in town—this town—in 1979, it was a low-built place, home to thirty-thousand people, all of whom seemed to know one another either by blood relation, marriage, or friendship. And romance, of course, for we were overwhelmingly young and romantic. Like many of us, I came to town in order to be closer to the canyon. The canyon always...
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Every Monday through Saturday, when I hear the clink of the mailbox lid, I remember a time in my early twenties when, dazed by all the career choices for which I didn’t qualify, I decided to give my life to the United States Postal Service. I didn’t have any idea how to make this happen, but I knew why I wanted it to happen, starting with my affection for...
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The town of Wellfleet, Massachusetts, is famous for its oysters, its beaches and its Interdependence Day parade. The parade takes place on the Fourth of July as neighboring Cape Cod towns are hosting their own celebrations, but only in Wellfleet is the notion of independence scrapped for the higher ideal of interdependence. It seems to me, especially given...
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Sometimes I just want to tell you who I am and where I come from, forget the need to write and polish a piece for a newspaper column. I want to leave behind my professional training, my writing skills, my accomplishments, and open the heart’s door. I’d start at the beginning if I knew where that was. Oh, so many ways to tell a story. I’ll just say there...
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Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. These are the words of Robert Frost in his poem, “Mending Wall.” It’s been years since I sat down and read that poem. I spent most of the month of March thinking about walls and I was curious about what the old Vermonter had to say. If you’ve never read it, please do. Two neighbors are walking the wall between...
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It’s the second day of March. This won’t go to print for more than a week. We all know what a week can bring. It was exactly a week ago that Ukrainians woke up to their country at war. But I am writing this now because the moment feels more important than a newspaper timeline. And because acts of aggression are timeless. Our friend Laura Kelly writes from...
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There sometimes arises a subject matter so unextraordinary, so taken for granted, that by its own pedestrian nature it becomes something of a rockstar. I hope you’ll agree with me that this is certainly the case with pockets. Pockets. Those rectangular appendages we’ve come to count on, those utilitarian bits of fabric we entrust our lives too, lives that...
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Among my mother’s possessions when she died was a wooden box, a box exactly the size of the one in which we buried her ashes. It had a sticky latch, a latch that seemed to tell us no, not yet, there are other tasks to take care of. So for weeks the box sat where it had always sat, under a table—a handsome mahogany table—beside a bookcase filled with dozens...
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The history of people gathering to protest, or marching to make their minds known, is a long one. Often peaceful by intent, and just as often the last stop before violence, every protest march is one side of a conversation, a monologue inviting dialogue. Or an act of extreme frustration, Not-Power speaking to Power and not being heard. Before this young...
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My neighbor took a panel of siding off his house a few days ago in order to replace an outdoor faucet. Because I’m a bit of a structural archeologist, I was curious and went over early in the morning to take a closer look. The first layer under the siding was stucco, and under that, chicken wire. It was old chicken wire, a different gauge than you see...
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When you hang around with truckers and sailors you learn the language of knots. Climbers and wranglers, arborists and roustabouts — they speak this language too. You can go anywhere in the world and find someone tying a bowline. It may be called by a different name, but it’s the same configuration: the rabbit goes out of the hole, around the tree and back...
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Last week, the Alabama legislature reversed a 1993 ruling that prohibited teaching yoga in the public schools. The new ruling came with a caveat: yoga okay, but no Oms, no namastes, no Sanskrit names for the postures. To call the postures asanas, which is everyday yoga-speak, that too would be a no-no, as would the practice of meditation, guided imagery,...
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In the late 1990s I traveled with a friend to what was then called Burma, and is now called Myanmar. We never intended to go to Burma; our plan was to explore Thailand, and perhaps move on to India after that. We even obtained visas for Egypt in case we still had itchy feet. I had never been to Asia, and in my journal I described Bangkok, where we landed,...
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Who among us has not been comforted by the words, Let me tell you a story? In my family it was my father who held the talking stick. He was not only a brilliant exaggerator, but he and his three brothers learned the gift of Blarney from their mother who learned it from her Irish grandfather who, we were told, did a short shift as the mayor of New York...
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My friend, Ann, suffers from dementia. This is the way I prefer to say it, rather than she has dementia. Having something implies an ownership of and intimacy with, a kind of never-ending entanglement that can but won’t be relinquished. It implies choice. If she has dementia, can’t she let go her grasp and unhave it? If she suffers from it, that’s her...
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Like many of us in our fair city, I came here from somewhere else. Or as we say in New England, I’m from away. I’m not actually from New England, though it wasn’t until recently I learned New York City was not part of New England. I don’t honestly know what it’s part of. New Yorkers don’t worry about things like that. Friends are initially astonished when...
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I first met Carmen twenty years ago when she lived on the corner of Third and Rose in a purple mobile home. We squeezed in at the kitchen table to study English while her three young kids came and went, hungry or cranky, needing this and that. I was a lousy English teacher, but despite my shortcomings, time did the work. We met at her kitchen table for ten...
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Consider the southpaw. She lives at first base, tends toward artistic genius, is only ten percent of the population but has occupied the White House six times in the last twelve presidencies. She is scorned, reviled, regarded with the utmost suspicion. In the Romance languages, she shares a Latin root with the word “sinister.” I’d like to shed some light...
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When I was a chubby six-year-old, I had a starring role in a little-known horror film called Blood and Guts. It was written, directed and filmed by a man whose friends and co-workers never suspected his Hitchcockian tendencies. He even had a walk-on role in the movie, á la Hitchcock, in which he played the part of a buxom nanny. This man was my father. We...
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Look at these faces. One of them could be yours. Look at the eyes. What do the eyes tell you that the mouth does not? Eyes are the epicenter of truth while the mouth pledges honesty to no one. Cover the eyes, as most masks do, and leave the mouth free to equivocate. Or cover the mouth with a band of bright color, an American flag, flowers, flames or...
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Story is how I move through unsettled times. Times when words like curfew, protest, tear gas, riot, fire, looting, violence, rage and justice take their place beside plague, pandemic, lockdown, quarantine, testing and n95. I write this on the last day of May, knowing that by the time these words come to you, four days hence, the world may have shifted...
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If we were to take our cue from the denizens of New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, we would be making our way through this rubble of loss, grief, anger and uncertainty by creating art. The photographs of Mapplethorpe, called by some pornographic, though they portrayed the truthful flesh of the most vulnerable; the memoirs...
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I’m a darn good bread baker, but my early works could have passed for geologic specimens. Not soft sandstones or limestones either. These were metamorphics, loaves of the Grand Canyon’s Precambrian, nourishment that could break your teeth. The problem was I didn’t believe in the delicate properties of yeast, or its shelf life—or recipes, for that matter. I...
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It turns out Henry VIII was not a very nice guy. Living in the dark ages of human history that preceded Tweeting, his version of the short and nasty was to chop off your head. Or eviscerate you. Or burn you at the stake. He is remembered most of all as an inveterate ladies’ man, but scratch the surface and you find a narcissist, an irascible whiner, a boy...
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Imagine my fourth-grade classroom. A shelf of math books and stacks of Weekly Readers. The smell of cedar shavings and nose-wrinkling disinfectant. Pale green walls covered with maps of Marco Polo’s travels along the Silk Road. Two high windows looking out across the East River at the foreign kingdom of Queens. A dark December day outside but inside, on...
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Years ago, Tillie Olsen published a slim volume of short stories called Tell Me A Riddle. In one of her best-known stories, “I Stand Here Ironing,” she paints a picture of the regrets and realities of a sometimes single, working class mother of the 1950s. At the risk of conflating narrator and author, I’ll venture that this modest record of the life of a...
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My friend—I’ll call her P—came here from a warmer continent and has no winter clothes. When I first met her a week before school began, she had no place to live, no one here previously known to her and no work. She had no bed, no dresser, no towels, sheets, blankets or pillows. We shared a pot of tea and a sandwich that day in my kitchen while she told me...
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I don’t know if you remember Flagstaff in the late ‘70s. I was a newcomer here, living out in the wilderness of Doney Park. I shared a bungalow with an attorney who worked in town, and in the field next door lived two horses, one white, one gray. I was quite the romantic and named the white one Pure Thought, a name I also bestowed on my white truck. We all...
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The year I played the cello was the same year I voted for Nixon, and if I had to say which one was the greater act of conviction I’m afraid I’d have to go with Nixon. Tricky Dick had not yet earned his name because in that particular election he did not become the president of the United States. The Senator from Massachusetts did. John F. Kennedy. I was...
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Mr. Barclay’s Dancing School met every Wednesday afternoon in the ballroom of the Pierre Hotel in New York City. There, under the gaudy chandeliers and watchful eyes of our instructors, we learned the rituals designed to secure us future husbands, children and happiness. At the same time, across the Pacific, the war in Vietnam was heating up, and on our...
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The Pine Tree Market sits between the newsstand and a Lilly Pulitzer dress shop on Main Street, Northeast Harbor. Its green awning offers shade from the weak sun and shelter from the soft persistent rains that wrap the Maine islands from June through August. Fog settles thickly in the harbor below the town, sometimes for weeks. The fancy yachts come in,...
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The poet Jane Hirshfield writes, “A world—or book—that is felt to contain the hidden is inexhaustible to the imagination.” Poetry is the subject at hand, but she might as well be talking about fishing. Or about my father when she writes, “Hiddenness is the ballast in the ship’s keel, the great underwater portion of a life that steadies the rest.” I took up...
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Every other Wednesday, at the unlikely venue of Bigfoot BBQ, the Italian language students meet for conversation. The air is abuzz with questions and answers: “Dov’è la cucina?” “Non lo so.” “Che cosa hai mangiato?” “Non lo so.” For those who have never set foot in Italy, as well as those whose visits number in the dozens, the exercise is the same: Learn...
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Last fall, in the spirit of the Medici family and a handful of Renaissance popes, we built an art shed, a pretty little 13 by 13 building with an open nature and north light. The idea was to draw itinerant artists, artists without studios, to the back yard by creating a kind of diurnal flophouse. Not being a painter or sculptor myself, I imagined men and...
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On days just like this there’s a frozen quality to everything I do or say or write, as if the north wind brings with it the curse of contraction. I know others feel differently. Winter is a quiet time, internal, full of family and firelight, warm drinks, good books. They see the stars reflected in the snow. I see an icy plain that sparkles with the...
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Every December, in the hallway outside the kitchen, my mother tacked up a large piece of construction paper divided into five columns. This was the Christmas list, and on it we five kids were invited to write our wants, our desires. From age 8 to 14 the only things that appeared in my column were two words: rowing machine. Some years it looked like this:...
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John Kennedy was killed on a Friday. The following Monday, our 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Taliaferro, wrote the words “What freedom means to me” on the board. We spent the class period writing our thoughts on this hard-to-grapple-with topic while she put her head down on her desk and wept. I don’t remember what my thoughts were. I do remember that Mrs....
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Dear Ms Dyssegaard, My agent, Malaga Baldi, has informed me that you are interested in my novel and its author. I am forty-eight years old, a published writer working under the pseudonym Hereafter Brown. I have never worked under a pseudonym before but the publishing climate of 2001 is different than when I began to write. As the emphasis now is on new...
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The house has good bones. The morning light falls on walls and sills and floorboards, and on the old kitchen stove. Here is the kitchen table where I used to write. There’s the painted chair my friend Malaga rescued from the corner of Broadway and 92nd Street. For 200 years the house has occupied this overgrown hollow. This used to be my home on Cape Cod...
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There was a forest between my grandmother’s house and the cliffs that rose from the sea. Spruce and balsam in equal share, white pine, red pine and a collection of towering hardwoods—single masts of maple and oak sailing along in an ocean of evergreens. For my purposes I needed the firs, the balsam. I’d take myself to the place where they were dominant and...
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In the late 1950s, while American families blew up in size and the seeds of the turbulent ‘60s sprouted and began to grow, my parents went through what I call their Mini-Mammalian Period, a microcosmic span of time reminiscent of the mid-Jurassic. It was characterized by an unbridled proliferation of undersized pets, beginning with the patriarch Templeton....
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The first camera I owned was a pinhole camera. I made it myself at summer camp in New Jersey. It was 1963, the year of a July solar eclipse, and the good people of Camp Red Ram came up with a plan to keep us from looking directly at the sun. We’d spent many days making keychain lanyards and plaster casts of raccoon prints. We learned how to sew our own pup...
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With a well-intended but somewhat unorthodox show of manners, I once picked up a roadkilled pheasant to bring to a friend who invited me to dinner. The bird was still warm. It had a broken wing but no visible trauma to the meaty body. It had clearly been hit by a passing vehicle only moments before. I was headed for the hills, the Knobs of Kentucky, on a...
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As I entered the bosque of adolescence, I was lucky. I had my particular bible. It was a thin book with brown and brittle pages that had not held up well to use and age. On the cover was Perseus, winged sandals on his feet, a thick sword in his right hand and in his left the head of Medusa, her scalp dripping with snakes. The book was called, simply,...
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About 2,500 years ago a man was seen walking the byways of India, a bowl in his hands. He was bald-headed and simply clad. His clothing covered him but did not speak of preference or fashion. He was variously barefoot or shod, depending on who he had met in his peregrinations and whether or not they themselves needed shoes. If the need was there, they...
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For many years I lived in a very small town at the tip of Cape Cod, Mass. Cape Cod is shaped like a Turkish slipper or an elf’s shoe, and where the slipper finishes its curl, or where a bell might hang from an elf’s shoe, is a town called Provincetown. It’s a town of artists and writers, poets and actors, gay men and women, teachers and plumbers and bakers...
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On this day, one year ago, I was on my way to spend the winter at a Zen Buddhist monastery in California. I have done this for many years. It is a recurring three months of my life that I spend in relative silence and contemplation, and although it is difficult and different and I have never tried to describe it as “an experience,” there is a great beauty...
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When I was 11 or 12, I developed rituals around perfection in order to enshrine it. A certain chaos ruled my house—five kids, two parents, several dogs, cats, rodents, even a skunk and a raccoon at one point. My siblings were born loud and messy, and I was not. I was born tidy and reflective. I developed ways of preserving a comfortable space around me by...
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In New York City where I grew up, we were all veterans of the Cold War. Even the youngest kids, before they could read, knew what the words Fallout Shelter looked like. And the sirens that ushered us off the streets to practice taking cover, we knew what they meant. We couldn’t articulate the end of the world, or the end of our world, the end of us, so...
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This is what you should know about me: I own a gun. It’s a honey-colored 20-gauge shotgun. The metal barrel smells like cold fire, and the gun has a heft to it that I’ve never grown into. It was a gift to me from my mother when I turned 18. The stock was too long for me then because I was expected to lengthen out. Whenever I shot my gun I’d have to do a...
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