A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
I had trouble telling time when I was a kid. The whole short-hand/long-hand, numbers-in-a-circle system struck me as prohibitively complicated. I knew you were supposed to glance at your wristwatch or a wall clock and instantly recognize that it was 3:47 or whatever, but it always took me a few too many ticks of the […]
Because I’m a writer, people sometimes assume I’ll like word games. Which makes no sense to me. Do you spend your leisure time human resourcing or whatever it is you do to earn a living? Thanks, but I get plenty of frustration and feelings of inadequacy from words during the day—I don’t need more in […]
Here’s something the Belgrade-born poet Charles Simic wrote in the 1990s about when he was a young immigrant in Chicago in the 1950s: Here I am on the midnight el riding to work or coming back after a long day. It’s winter. It’s bitter cold. Every time the door opens, we shiver, our teeth […]
Some people pick up refrigerator magnets or shot glasses or HPV during their travels. I collect pencils of the world. I used to have a lot more, but I’ve thinned the ranks. The collection is housed in a large cylindrical glass vase I keep on my desk, and I’d like to avoid expanding to a […]
The knife is the king, and the big fork is the queen. Each spouse has a sidekick—the spoon (a duke) for the king, the salad fork (a lady-in-waiting) for the queen. Those are the roles I assigned the flatware whenever I’d find myself at a restaurant as a child. I would put the royal quartet […]
My husband, Frank, and I recently took a guided bike tour of Boston. Somebody gave us a gift certificate for the experience when we were leaving New York. The second I mounted my ride, I told the wiry woman leading the tour that the seat felt too high, but she thought it looked fine and […]
August 6 was this site’s second birthday. As in the first post and the first anniversary post, I’m marking the date by trying the Virgilian lottery, a form of fortune-telling where you open Virgil’s works at random and point. Whatever passage your finger lands on supposedly foretells your future. I don’t own copies of all […]
The dermatologist I went to as a teenager used to call me “Moose.” He had an avuncular manner and always wore a visor with two inset magnifying eyepieces so that he could get a good look at his patients’ hideously clogged pores. I think “Moose” was supposed to set me at ease or maybe make […]
I’m currently on my second passport. I got my first one in 2004 in order to travel to Italy with my family. I still remember the photo inside because I looked wild-eyed and slightly deranged—sort of like Jack Nicholson in The Shining when he uses an ax to chop his way through that bathroom door and […]
Among the treasures I unearthed while packing and unpacking my belongings for my recent move from New York City to Boston: a lapel pin bearing the likeness of Mary Tyler Moore; a handwritten love poem addressed to me by a college classmate who contends that I am “silly on the phone” before praising my “manly […]
Indirect Objects 