CREATIVITY — LIKE LIFE — HAS ITS SEASONS. FALL WOULD LIKE TO CALL YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS. FALL WOULD LIKE TO SHOW YOU SEVERAL FAIL-PROOF WAYS TO USE ITS ENERGY TO REBOOT YOURS. Feeling blocked, stuck, stagnant? Creatively or otherwise? Fall has a cure. Every seasonal shift reminds us that time is moving on, and diems are there to be… Read More
Low-key, high-energy, challenging and gentle, Tuesdays with Crescent is a 10-week, once-a-week small writing group. It takes place on ten consecutive Tuesday evenings, in real time (6:30 pm to 8:30 pm Central). You may attend from anywhere, online, via Zoom, or physically (in Fayetteville, Arkansas). Participation is limited to 12. In just ten sessions, you will shift from anxiety to… Read More
My dear fellow member of the Club No One Wants to Join, I started Widowhood Wednesday just under a year ago. I was almost seventeen years past my first widowhood, almost three past my second. I was accompanying (to the extent it is possible that another person can accompany another in the freshets of recent grief), my recently widowed friend… Read More
Janus, the Roman god who gave January its name, was two-faced. Not in the saying-mean-things-behind-someone’s back way: rather, he had two faces on either side of his handsome head. Thus, he could look forward, into the future, and backwards, into the past. Notice, though, he had no face for “now”, which is — moment to moment, second by second —… Read More
Quick, think of your favorite musician. Bonnie Raitt? Yo-Yo Ma? Doesn’t matter. John Coltrane? Lady Gaga? Eric Clapton? Youssou N’Dour? Doesn’t matter. Dolly Parton, Mirian McPartland, Howlin’ Wolf, Luciano Pavarotti? Still doesn’t matter. Because whoever he or she is, he or she did (and, if alive, still does) three things that anyone, who is good at anything, does. Those three things:… Read More
So I’m driving home last night from yoga, in a dreamy state, and I pass the farm stand at high Meadows and can see from the road that it looks like they still have two boxes of what are doubtlessly the very very very last of the season fresh raspberries. I go past, really not inclined to stop, but those… Read More
Oh oh… Surpassingly strange, strong, moving, out-of-the-blue moment tonight. The words I will try to find for it can only inadequately express the experience. I was at a yoga class which I take once a week, on Tuesday night, called restorative yoga. This is the one fitness class of any kind, anywhere, that I’ve ever taken, where at some level… Read More
I was innocently standing at the foot of my hill by the mailbox, flipping through the envelopes, about eight years ago. And there, smack in the middle of the mail, was one from Bank of America, with the word ‘statement.’ I glared at it. And heard myself say aloud, snarlingly, “Goddammit! I thought I was done with you!” I took… Read More
At the memorial service for the poet Miller Williams, a service held a month ago at the Fayetteville, Arkansas public library, I met his daughter, singer/songwriter/musician Lucinda Williams. It turned out she knew of one of my more obscure and long ago cookbooks, and she began telling me the dishes she made from it… “And those vegetable fritters? I must’ve… Read More
This is the way it works. You return to a town where you used to live. You go on a short walk, on a street you have walked many times. You are only stretching your back and legs and getting a few more steps in so your Fitbit will be happy at the end of the day. You are only… Read More
After the Los Angeles funeral of my late father, Maurice Zolotow, a well-dressed, chic, trim woman came up to me and extended her hand. She had excellent posture, and her hair — a jet-black that looked neither harsh nor unnatural — was well-styled in a short, flattering, expensive cut. Her age was hard to guess (I figured out later that… Read More
Why are some saved and some lost? Once a month most months, I make the round-trip drive from Westminster West,Vermont to Hastings-on-Hudson, New York (where I spend a week with my 97-year-old mother, Charlotte Zolotow). Leave Vermont, cross Massachusetts, cross Connecticut, reach New York. And then reverse it. Exit after exit, I read the names of the towns and have… Read More
