We planned to go for a walk at twilight tonight, David and I, but when we stepped outside the dusk was chillier than we'd anticipated. "I wonder if I should go check the forecast," he said. "Yeah, you should," I said, "because if it's going to get below freezing we probably need to do some harvesting." He went back inside,… Read More
“50 year old shoulder”
If I want to eat anything else, I have 15 minutes in which to do it. No solid food after midnight. When I hurt my left shoulder about a decade ago, some now-forgotten person said to me, “Rotator cuff, probably. Rotator cuffs just wear out. You know what they call it in Chinese medicine? ‘Fifty year-old shoulder.’” My friend had… Read More
why every life should have a pugilistic 98-year old in it
Aunt Dot beats the odds again. Aunt Dot (Dorothy Arnof to the rest of the world except my brother, Stephen) is out of the hospital and back in her apartment on East 57th Street. (If this doesn’t sound like stop-the-presses news to you, please go back and read the posts for May 21 and May 19). Aunt Dot’s 98th birthday… Read More
Relationshape-shifting: change, constancy, love, time, and “blace”
From Toni Morrison, in Inventing the Truth: the Art and Craft of Memoir: "When I hear someone say "truth is stranger than fiction," I think that old chestnut is truer than we know… it doesn’t say that truth is truer than fiction; just that it’s stranger, meaning that it’s odd. It may be excessive, it may be more interesting, but… Read More
night drive with rain, arrows, gingerbread crumbs, too-big numbers, and, as always, questions
"… so perhaps the work is the arrow, flying from the writer towards what she will become…" This may not be the exact quote, but it’s more or less what I remember from May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, which I read some thirty-five years ago. It was a book I found self-indulgent even then, but the idea behind the… Read More
