Category Archives: writing

Still hot. Memoir post

August 12, 2025. 93 degrees.

I wrote this two Junes ago.

My mother didn’t seem afraid of much. Then again, maybe she was afraid of everything. She certainly feared rejection. Certainly she feared a few of my father’s moods. Dying. She could snap and crackle with leonine brassiness easily mistaken for confidence. She bossed people around, refused to seek out permission for things. Again, looked like confidence and maybe it was. Inside, I know she often yearned to be accepted and loved and felt that she wasn’t. Or at least, not enough. That’s a wound that competes with confidence.

But don’t get me wrong. (Don’t get me wrong is a thing I might’ve said to her as I equivocated in true middle-child fashion, a stance easily mistaken for the absence of confidence).

Don’t get me wrong: a sure hand informed a lot of her life. Design: boom she had it. That indefinable thing we call taste. Instincts: bam. She trusted her gut. She trusted her gut and couldn’t understand why I didn’t. She could read people and was often right about them in a way that made me temporarily hate her.

She knew how to teach. She knew how to teach those with talent spilling out of their pockets. She knew how to see talent in those who kept it under lock and key. She knew how to teach troublemakers and nerds alike. It made her powerful in a certain realm, beloved, even. Yes, she was beloved in the art room, but not the teachers’ lounge where her constant smoking bothered some and her guttural smoker’s laugh was often laced with contempt.

In spite of a certain penchant for being stubborn and opinionated like my mother, I am more my father’s daughter. I share his love of solitude, his appreciation for an argument well-made. For most of my life, he was an atheist. I consider myself agnostic.

He’d been an altar boy growing up in Queens. His mother had swished her nylon-encased stout legs to Mass every morning. I remember the rosary beads dangling from her hands. You’d think after growing up like that it might have been a bigger deal giving it up but it didn’t seem that way. When my father stopped going to Mass, it was as if he took off an ill-fitting jacket and let it drop to the floor. Shrug. That was it.

He elevated science. The planets in their travels, for instance, were elegant and enduring symbols of a different kind of holiness. He bought a telescope and showed us kids Jupiter’s red spot, the moon’s shadowy craters. Mathematics satisfied him too. How many times in helping me with advanced algebra did he say, “let X equal” and how predictably did I groan because I got that part and wanted him to go faster. But no. Math is nothing if not taking things in order.

His sacraments? Walking through the woods. Fishing.

He didn’t understand why I cared so much about what other people thought, which was maybe his way of saying: trust yourself, trust your thoughts, your perceptions. Trust your ability to walk away from things.

My mother said, You worry too much. I didn’t think I worried too much. I thought I didn’t worry precisely enough. Imagine worrying about your worry.

My father left early. My mother did too, but 14 years later. One son met her, neither son met him.

Yesterday, a guest on a news program reminded me a little of my father – clear blue eyes, aquiline nose, a slight spray of freckles. I happened to be sitting with my brother and said so. He shrugged. Oh come on I insisted put glasses on him and you’d see it.

Nobody in my family really resembles anyone else. Or not for long anyway. My sister and I perhaps sounded alike but that’s it. My maternal grandfather mistook me for his middle daughter right before his death, but I was ten and changed a lot afterwards. My brother got that same grandfather’s nose, but no one got my father’s long, narrow one or my mother’s underbite.

It’s funny how that goes. When one of my boys was younger he could go in a flash from looking like his own father to resembling mine. Now he is only his own self, which of course is the best way to be.

All this talk of parents and children can’t help but make me feel urgent about time. How little perhaps is left.

Prompt response 6/17/25

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Here is the prompt:

Forgive the repetition from earlier posts. Also it might be unfinished, or at least ending in a strange place, but that’s the nature of a timed prompt.

What if home is not a place but a feeling? Not original. Begin again.

What if home is a favorite author? A totetable collection of pages that opens worlds and never lets you down? A writer whose storytelling makes you swoon and whose characters grab you from the get-go. What if home is the space between Best Buy and the highway? No man’s land.

I wanna gather up all my tops and cut up the shirts with stains. Today? A faint coffee blotch mid-chest. Which leads me to say: home could be not caring about all that.

Home these days is to worry, worry, worry. To be infuriated and overwhelmed and embarrassed and deeply out of sorts. Our country, in other words, our country defies home. This regime turns home inside out. It shits on the founding fathers. It acts as middle-man for the bottomless greed of those in office.

I sit cross legged in a mid-century modern chair in a mid-century modern house. Outside helicopters offer occasional menace. Counterpoint: the neighbor’s water feature. Ah!

Ravens are much bigger than crows. I don’t know if they’re smarter or not but I can’t help feeling that every time I’m on the driveway or out on the deck, they’re sizing me up. On the path that winds around Mount Washington, they dropped walnuts in our path. Near misses. “Oh, that’s on purpose,” my brother would tell us later.

I was not one of the 20,000 people that walked shoulder to shoulder in downtown LA this past weekend. Glendale’s closer and I didn’t go there either. The tension around staying put surprised me. If I’d had a vehicle I could comfortably drive (not my brother’s truck, that’s for sure), I’d have left him with my husband and at least driven by to honk and show support, my tiny “8647” sign on the dash. But I can barely get in the truck, never mind drive it, and while I know some parts of Glassell Park and East LA, I don’t know the way to Glendale.

How easily I am undone here. I can’t find shit in the kitchen – the rasp, the second cutting board, the meat thermometer, a mixing bowl for Christ’s sake. None of the knives are sharp, turning the pink hump of a shallot into an adversary. There’s no oven fan meaning that every time you open its door, furnace-like heat blasts out and you better not have your face too close. It also means cooking lamb chops stove top set off the smoke alarms, necessitating dashing about setting up floor fans, opening doors. Needless to say, I prefer cooking at home

So maybe home is where you can find things in the kitchen.

Every other plant here has spines. Spontaneous weeding, which is how I typically weed in Massachusetts, is not a good idea here given how close many of the invasive grasses and clovers are to nasty cacti. The nettles are no fun either. Gloves, a must.

On the pleasant side: a lozenge of a swimming pool filled with salty warm water. What a pleasurable way to end an afternoon! A dunk. A paddle. A blowing of air into bubbles, life-affirming bubbles.

The sun sets over the fence that lines the pool – making the giant ficus back there go inky black. Which reminds me, when I get home, the 350-year-old beech behind my neighbor’s house will be gone. Will it even feel like home anymore?

The stupid limits I set. Once it was: when and if New England Mobile Book Fair closes, I’m leaving Newton. Then it was, if that copper beech ever comes down, I’m leaving Newton. I looked at that tree while prepping veggies or while rolling out a dough. The setting sun glared through its branches, visible from backyard, deck, family room, and dining room. Upstairs from the bed, I might see the moon wander through its dark tangle of branches.

It got sick. Many beeches in New England are getting sick. It’s not 120° temperatures or catastrophic sudden flooding, or fires taking out entire neighborhoods, but it is climate related and a grievous loss.

Imagine how it might feel (speaking of trees and regimes and protests), if our government embraced the urgent need to slow global warming. Imagine if that corrupt pretense that it’s a hoax dropped away and reality shone through, its terrifying dimensions relieving compared to denial. What if our government acted like having a future mattered more than satisfying the energy lobbies? What then?

A collective sigh. A dropping of the shoulders. A leaning into whatever it would take (and trust me when I tell you it’s not recycling). Rather, we’d feel determined and maybe even optimistic, willing as communities to endure hardships in service of the future.

Truth, in fact, has been sacrificed to profit to Murdoch to Trump and his dumb shit children, to the tech bros, who now want to violate whole communities to keep their crypto and AI factories cool.

Five million people is a lot of people. Trump coming home early from the G7 because he’s tired, defeated, out of his league, and a shell of a man is evident to everyone. I applaud the European sneers and Canadian interruptions. Our national demon spends too much time insulated. Oh, look, there’s Pam Bondi singing his praises and declaring burners of Teslas domestic terrorists. But a murderer of Democratic lawmakers? Not so much. So maybe he doesn’t quite know how incredibly reviled he is.

The reels from all over the country bringing us to tears. How unified and gratifying the crowds! The vast protests in Idaho, for Christ’s sake. North Carolina, North Florida, Oklahoma. This was not exclusively a Boston, LA, Chicago, New York thing by any stretch. He had to have seen a minute or two of coverage? But even if he’d been shielded from it all, every single world leader whose hand he shook had seen the footage and understood the import.

So I guess what I’m saying is that a return to sanity would feel like going home. This isn’t wishing for some mythic past that never existed, but for a kind of normalcy that might allow us to progress one foot after the other. Or maybe even running to preserve the oceans, the ice caps, clean water, trees.

If hate could take a person down, Trump would be long dead. How often that wish comes up in conversation amazes me. Everyone, not just my radical friends, but all of them, wish him dead and say so.

June 5 stream. Rant or Lament? You decide

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Written on 6/5/25 to the prompt: Suddenly, she’d forgotten…

In my neighborhood

Suddenly she’d forgotten how to pay the bills, missed the feel of coins at the bottom of her purse and the ease of inserting one into a meter. She didn’t know where to find their retirement accounts online or how to enter them if she did. Except it wasn’t sudden, was it? The gradual usurpation of pen, ink, envelopes, and stamps worked to her detriment. The last time she’d been in charge of paying the bills, the checkbook, with its tactile register and reassuring march of check numbers and dates, had been at the center.

Passwords were the bane of many people’s existences and she was no exception. Everything she did to make life more streamlined – facial recognition on her phone, passwords stored on her phone, credit card numbers stored on her phone – also made her vulnerable. And that was last year. Who knew what DOGE’s data-scraping and now Palantir’s insertion into government would do?

Longtermism was explained in horrifying detail in The Atlantic article she read before getting out of bed. It was so stunningly elitist a philosophy and so lacking in empathy and so embedded with the levers of power, that it’s amazing she got out of bed. It’s also amazing she didn’t stomp on her phone just like that heavy-booted villain in last night’s murder mystery which – talk about horrifying — she can’t remember the title of or the setting of, just the memory of that black boot stomping the protagonist’s phone to shards. “What then?” she asks for him. “What now,” she asks for everyone else.

She knows to turn facial recognition off when she flies and for once she’s grateful how invisible old women are, especially very short old women. The specter of being found out as a Trump-hating-elitist-east coast-liberal haunts her now and amplifies the years-old questions – Why blog? What is the point? Now instead of being mystified by people who have zero internet footprint, she envies them.

So many specters to face! The specter of widowhood and having suddenly to pay the bills and manage the accounts and pay the taxes. She only hopes she dies first – in her sleep, suddenly and painlessly, of course. The specter of white nationalism and criminalized miscarriages and bird flu and now – who knew? – the advance of a flesh-eating fly coming up from Panama.

You’d think longtermers would accelerate our response to the climate crisis. But no, these selfish pricks would rather, with their billions of dollars and mega-egos, hallucinate about colonizing Mars or about manufacturing islands as paradise-like as they are exclusive. Burning peons for fuel gets closer and closer to the national agenda.

It’s one thing to watch Gestapo Barbie, blinking furiously, define habeus corpus as the exact opposite of what it is or to see the wide-eyed freak-show heading the FBI casually and duplicitously declare that the budget will get done when it gets done after he talks to some people. It’s another thing altogether to watch Russ Vought, Project 2025 author and current head of the OMB, in full sentences and with smug authority declare why HE has not submitted a budget. His chilling narrative implies that the Impoundment Clause of the Constitution doesn’t matter anymore and why not? Because he says so, I guess.

Destruction is the name of the game.

I wish HE was a robotic clone who could be powered down by some secret cabal of MIT zoomers.

Who will save us? What will be left when this regime is at last toppled?

Chris Murphy’s new beard turns him into the age’s soothsayer – the truth-telling King of Swords slashing the air with his blade. “Focus,” he shouts, “on what they’re doing NOW, because there may not be 2026 elections.”

Installation celebrating early free Black community in Massachusetts. Walden Woods

The Atlantic article referred to is here. I learned about the flesh-eating flies in the recent Atlantic as well.

Insomnia collages from first week of June

Passage from 1/1/2024

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This morning, I found a few pieces of yellow paper with this scribbled on it. It describes, in part, riding the T home from Boston. We’d gone to The Mapparium with a friend. It’s a bit stream of consciousness but enjoy anyway.

The flowers could be eaten or thrown in the fire. Same with ambition. The sweater cuffs are rolled, the sleeves too long. I can’t stay. Really, I can’t find my way home. An anthem from the 70’s: Come down off your throne. Toss off the ermine-lined robe. As if you ever preferred being clothed. But the naked knees and throat make such easy targets. Groveling can be done in pants or not in pants. So can sex. The man pissing at the Hynes Auditorium T stop had a big rip in the rear of his denim pants — his dirty, wrinkled ass visible through the tear. Somehow the sight of that flesh disturbed more than the pee arcing out of his penis. Two of us grab a seat going west. “Get in the old car. Get in the old car.” Light flashes on cement near Fenway, between trees near Hammond Pond. Everything has a voice, a place. To whom do you speak? What chorus pours forth? She once gave a damn, now her eyes burn, sometimes from the cold, other times from the heat. The rib cage is rusty. It’s caked with flaky debris, oxidized from exposure. We go in. Then we go out. The singing bowl silent. The shoes cold when we slide them on in the morning. He used to chew shoes, the dog, but now he doesn’t. He still likes coat pockets redolent with the smell of treats though. Did you close the coat-closet door all the way? A clock announces a dance. I made myself write “dance” instead of “doom.” Too much death talk gets boring. Where are we? Three seconds to midnight? Eight? I plan to stitch lines of green thread while sitting next to a fire later and I hope my eyes won’t be burning then. I hope the dog will have left my parka alone. There will be no savage music for accompaniment, and by that I mean no news from the red, red, red inhabitants on The Hill. The flowers stab the sky with their beautiful fecundity. The rug, he says, captivates me. Have you listened even a little? To the eggs, sizzling in the pan, to the clack of a keyboard, to a bossy ticking clock? I will leave my shoes where you won’t trip over them because I’m nice that way. I can’t wait to have two front teeth again, the apparatus of waiting so cumbersome and it makes me lisp. “Find another Isaac,” we pronounce as if it were a simple finger-snapping matter. I too will die if I don’t keep writing. Really? Is that really true? The home and its distractions. For instance, making butternut ginger soup. Then almond biscotti. Then hummus. There’s dog hair to sweep up, always. I like to do it when the sun shines on the floor so that the retrieval of order is immediately observable. Then there are leaves and branches fallen out back, needing disposal. Stairs to vacuum. A toilet to swish. And a beckoning couch. You get the idea. There’s so much to do that is not writing that my hands burn, my hips too, and my eyes water. I can’t find my way home. Maybe home is nothing without a hand waggling ink across the legal pad. There, it announces, I exist. I’m coming down off my throne. I’m not talking about death. The flowers are not mine, not any of ours. They circle the heads of state and by heads of state, I mean the crowns of diplomats. Those flimsy collections of cells and intention, bartering, pressuring, ordering, judging – but with what intention, you ask, what intention? How to make building materials out of rubble, is a thing I heard on the way here. Gaza. Gaza. Gaza. One co-author dead. Covid. Covid. Covid. I can’t find my way home and I have a home. I struggle to imagine otherwise. The clock telling me to eat an orange, to laugh, goddamnit. Orchid breath, singing, bull brain, and mercury feet. Why not?

This video was recorded on 1/1/24. (Unless you see a recent one from Boulder like my husband does?)

Pics below from December 2023.