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
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
“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 always said he wanted to… 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
It's 9:24 a.m. I have to leave at 10:00 to drive a deeply depressed friend to her therapy appointment. I am in the middle of writing one of my long, thoughtful, typical essay-type posts, which my friend Ronni Lundy calls "blongs." I left it, and began writing this instead. I have a bowl of Irish oatmeal beside me, cooked with… Read More
…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?”
The original inventers of twittering have been coming and going from the feeder all day today. Whenever I look out, from the bathroom window upstairs or the french doors in the kitchen downstairs, different visitors are at the cafe. Finches yellow as canaries, finches as reddish-purple as if they’d bathed in grape juice. Sparrows, in tweedy brown-gray-black-white. Black-caped chicadees. Grosbeaks,… Read More
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 myself, gladly, among this group,… Read More
Walking yesterday, up near Frazier's sugar shack here in Vermont, I heard an animal rustle in the underbrush edging the woods by the gravel road. Though I stood stock-still and watched, I couldn't see what it was. Too large for a chipmunk or a squirrel, smaller by far than a deer, I was left only with the sudden sound of… Read More
Today, coming down to the hill towards the pond, beginning my morning walk, two animals — one large, one small — standing in the middle of the gravel road. I caught my breath, stood stock-still, blinked and waited, blinking a few times to clear my not-so-good vision so I could identify them. Ah. A white-tailed deer, and – what was… Read More
I began writing these words on Easter Sunday, as Christians celebrated the triumphant arc of their spiritual year, when Christ rises from death. But resurrection itself belongs to everyone, regardless of belief, or non-belief. Here in much of America, Easter-time coincides with the year's resurrection. The alarm clock set by the spin and wobble of this particular planet on which… Read More
Re: my father, Maurice Zolotow, and Roman Polanski… Y'all know I am given to writing long, thoughtful, wrestling-with-big-questions blog posts — what my friend and fellow cookbook writer / memoirist Ronni Lundy called "blongs" (as in "blog" plus "long"). But you can teach an old dragon new tricks. This is a quickie. Every time I hear the coverage about Polanski's… Read More
