You can choose.

To be happy, to be an optimist. Or not. To see clearly or to leave the oily smudges on your glasses. To be grateful for your good luck and proud of your hard-won successes or to complain only that it was a… Read full post »

I was on the phone with my daughter Amy last September, early in my granddaughter's second-grade school year. She said, “Simone came home from school and told me they did the lockdown drill today.”

I remembered her first year there, kindergarten… Read full post »

 

 Thursday, 9.8.11

            Some guy at the power substation in Yuma, AZ flipped the wrong switch and most of the lower third of the Great State of… Read full post »

       I usually write about things that make me happy, so you’re probably expecting this to be about my handsome husband or music or maybe lobster and Jarlsberg potato galettes. Instead I’m serving up sadness that will… Read full post »

            I love vegetables because I’ve been eating them since I can remember putting food in my mouth. My daughter loves ve/… Read full post »

April showers bring May flowers, the old rhyme says. They do and they have. This May’s blooms have bejeweled nearly every branch and stem in my protected garden inside the snake wall. Our summers here in the arid coastal sage scrub of inland San Diego are… Read full post »

            The judge told the bailiff to bring in the jury.

    The door from the public hallway opened, and twelve jurors and three alternates walked single file toward their seats i… Read full post »

            Mr. Forte is a very funny guy but often not when he’s trying to be.  I mean, he can’t tell a joke to save his life:  forgets the punch line, moves it to the beginning, gets the inflection wrong and has
… Read full post »

   Our house is in an oasis of Dark Sky on a low ridge west of Black Mountain.  Here, without fences, our neighbors’ gardens slip into the canyons that follow our street downhill to its dead end in a stand of sycamores, their thirsty roots/… Read full post »

            It’s wet, the kind of day that makes me wish I owned a pair of yellow Wellies.  We’ve had a steady rain for two days in sunny southernmost California, but it stopped long enough for me to squish outside in my flipflops… Read full post »

             It’s an almost-cold morning.  Gauzy fog the color of thin milk hangs in the canyons, brightened in the east by a 40-watt fluorescent sun.  The elm outside my office has half its leaves/… Read full post »

            Roads, belts of asphalt or concrete, arrow straight or curly as a grapevine, they slip and wriggle through mountains, vectoring the view, and slash true as a blade on the flats, the shortest distance between two/… Read full post »

            Long, strong legs and arms, tan and storkily elegant, high heels, an exotic orange, yellow and blue scarf tied as a headband across her forehead, clamping down an unruly goldenbrown mane, thickly noncompliant.  Brassy ear/… Read full post »

            I was a teenager when Dave Marston[i] killed himself in 1965. 

            He had been married his entire adult life; he and his wife had two teenagers. … Read full post »

He’s always there, in the alley, where he sleeps in a metal storage container with one long side missing.  Flattened cardboard boxes in tidy stacks form a row alongside his bedroom, as I think of it, and line the bottom inside where he lies, a slightly taller stack… Read full post »

  A little fun for you on this ho-hum Thursday morning.  Bear with me through the setup.

I was in LA yesterday.  My friend has recently moved to a loft downtown.  On the way to dinner, she wanted me to see The Standard, a tres chic hotel nearby, so we… Read full post »