I received a lovely note from the owner of the beach-house we rented last month. He expressed that he’s very pleased with our feedback; I wonder whether he felt inundated by our thoroughness. Because not only did we (I, in this case) craft a review of our stay for the booking website, but I sent […]
My parents, and their parents before them, demonstrated how to be respectful to children. The skill’s not particular to interacting with the young and very young–listening that accepts is worth doing in any interaction. In fact, I wonder whether my mom honed her skills with the oldest of her relatives. Time has unmoored the reasons […]
My sister is going to the zoo today. In her case, I should say, “a zoo,” because she loves creatures and visits any handy zoo whenever she can. (Kind of like the way B & I visit libraries.) And each time I know she’s going, I sing to her—or send her—the song from the album […]
D K Ask an economist: can there be an oversupply of smoked meats? I mean, it seems like there’s infinite demand around here… (your dad and I just found another new trailer of bbq brisket.) No. Demand for smoked meats is perfectly inelastic. Similar to the demand for insulin. I’m not sure why the benchmark […]
“The poem is just what you can somehow bring back, but you yourself know it’s only a shred of a memory. Like beautiful wet stones from the beach, which dry.” —Jean Valentine, “What Remains Unseen,” collected in A God In the House: poets talk about faith, ed. Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler
Have you heard of “stereotype threat”? Big-deal psych finding, where being reminded of one’s socially disadvantaged position is enough to deep-six any subsequent (academic, performance) results for one? Turns out that research is “overcooked, overstated, and oversold.” I think this is such a big deal that I’m ceding my spot to the article above. Go […]
There’s nothing as focus-destroying for me as knowing something might be arriving, but not when. Five minutes from now? Five hours? Five days? How about now? Or now? Orrrr… now? That’s a day shot in the head.
Today’s the day I tell the story. It’s not, originally, my story. It was My Sweetie’s; he brought it home from work one day. It would’ve been perhaps as early as the year before A was born, because it happened in the waning days of this one particular glorious challenge of a project. These were […]
(*I linked to the song of the title at the bottom.) Puttering around the kitchen this morning, pulling my breakfast together, I thought about my Granny, and my Skipper. Maybe because it’s summer, and I always spent at least a week with them each summer, reading books and playing in the town park once a […]
“How can I keep from singing Your praise?” When I woke this morning, I was already singing. After my second cup of coffee, and My Sweetie’s kisses on my neck, my brain filled with a double-handful of beautiful possibility—our bathroom looking so, walls and counters and full of light; the ‘dry creek’ of the walk […]
