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…
Tag: appreciation
Keeping the “dead” in “deadline”
“He cannot be dead,” said Paul, my father’s editor at Playboy. “It is Friday. I am sitting here looking at a pitch letter he sent me on Monday.” Things you don’t realize will be part of your job description: returning voicemail messages left for your father, who has suddenly died. “Well, Paul,” I said, “Maurice…
speaking the unspeakable; accepting the unacceptable
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…
uncovering: a yak, a six-year-old, and some witches walk into a post…
…that particular morning, that little girl in Atlanta did have a question. A real question, and, as I have said, she asked it with solemnity and gravitas. Her manner made me wonder later if she, literal as all children are, had perhaps been puzzling over it for weeks, as I remember puzzling over why “witches” were in the Pledge of Allegiance. (“And to the Republic, for witches stand…”)
“Do you believe,” that little girl asked me, “that it’s true that you really can’t judge a book by its cover?”
Aunt Dot & the Splendid Sunflowers
When I came to 410 East 57th Street that night, it was already dark, but not late. Early winter, then, it must have been, maybe about 7:30 or 8:00. A Sunday evening. Aunt Dot, then 95 or 96, was seated facing into the living room, in one of the two 50’s-era Danish modern recliner chairs…
whimper while you work: life-density, writing, very dark chocolate
First, let me say how humiliated I am that I haven’t done a new blog post since (OH my GOD, this is ETERNITY in Blogland!) … since last July. Actually, I did do one. It was, juicily, about older babes who are still sex-positive in their late 50’s and onward, sometimes way onward. I number…