A couple of days ago I got a voice mail from Wendy-the-Buddhist. She had a terrible head cold. Her kids were sick. She needed some novel recommendations because as she said on the phone, “I’m tired of all this Zen crap.” (One of Wendy’s best qualities is that while a dedicated Zen practitioner, she also understands that taking one’s Zen too seriously belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the principles.) So I went downstairs into my lovely hidey-hole office where the library currently resides and started looking through the fiction section (legacy of my bookseller past, my library is sorted by…
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Okay, I admit it, when I saw the news, I got a little weepy. I’ve written before about how the Kentucky Derby kills me every time, and there are times, like watching Barbaro in the Preakness that having grown up surrounded by horses and horse shows, in houses cluttered with boots and tack, having spent most of my childhood in barns with people who live and breathe horses — even if you were a kid like me mostly reading a book over in the viewing room waiting to go home, you wind up with an eye for when something has…
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I’ve been sort of following this story for the last couple of weeks, and today comes the sad news that they found Charlie Fowler’s body on a peak in China. I didn’t know Charlie well, but for a couple of years, he was my next door neighbor in Telluride. He was a kind, softspoken guy who was a little older than we were and who had climbed a whole bunch of impressive peaks in Asia and South America. I lived next to this big blue house full of climber guys — it was an ever-changing group. This was before Telluride…
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My dear friends Bill and Maryanne lost their beloved (and enormous) golden retriever Moja this weekend. Moja was a very special dog — one hundred and twenty five pounds of big yellow love — and he died quite suddenly of a twisted gut. It was beyond awful. There were big gulping sobs and tears all around. All I could think to do was drive home from the vet’s office and pull the emergency stash of pot roast out of the freezer. I made it ages ago, and there was too much for just the two of us, so I froze…
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It’s an odd week here at LivingSmall — September 11 rolls around once again and I can’t help but remember calling Patrick, who was in the truck on his way to work. He hadn’t wanted to wake me up before he left, just after the first plane hit. We were on the phone together when the first tower fell. Seeing all the footage makes me miss him. He was the person I knew I could call any time, and we all need that person in our lives, the one we know we can pick up the phone when something happens.…
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The garden is finally starting to come in this summer. I’m on vacation for 2 weeks, and I spent a lovely morning the other day puttering in the vegetable garden. I pulled out all the peas, which did really well this year, but which were starting to get woody. The tomatoes are starting to pop after a couple of days of hot weather — it really takes until August to get a tomato around here, but once they get past that 6-inch stage it feels like summer’s really begun. I have a lot of greens, and more onions than I…
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The mini-daffodils are blooming in my side yard and yesterday I turned over the vegetable beds, planted peas. Tonight it looks like rain (or maybe snow) is on the way, but yesterday was sunny, nearly seventy degrees, and a lovely day. Things outside the garden are still a little alarming, but inside the yard there are dogs, and plants starting to green up, and tiny little spinach seedlings coming up.
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To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior…Whenever and wherever a foehn wind blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about ‘nervousness,’ about ‘depression.’ … . Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem Even for Livingston, a place where the wind routinely blows so hard that they have to divert truck traffic off the interstate …
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Does anyone think it’s a coincidence that on the day that we’re about to swear in Samuel Alito, the man responsible for this statement: ”Why do you keep bringing up the fact that this case involves the strip search of a 10-year-old child?”(and a black girl child at that), that Coretta Scott King would choose to leave the planet? Does no one else see this as a Very Bad Sign?
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I had a long talk on the phone last night with my cousin Jennifer. Jennifer’s four years younger than I am, and her mother was my mother’s older sister. Every time there was a crisis in our childhoods, and there were plenty, we were shipped off to our Aunt Lynn’s house, so in a lot of ways Jennifer and I were raised almost more like siblings than like cousins. I have a very clear memory of Patrick and I, having been dropped off one snowy night by someone who had agreed to drive us from where? Our Dad’s house? Our…