A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
Last year when I was in Aruba, I went windsurfing of all things. It’s out of character for me to try sports, especially the ones that involve taking off your shirt in public. But I was on a travel-writing assignment, and when that’s the case I’m liable to do a lot of things I normally […]
There’s a scene in the musical Caroline, or Change where the title character, a maid in 1963 Louisiana, is explaining to 8-year-old Noah, the son of her employer, that God made everything—“the whole world, you and me and this wash machine.” “Did God make the dryer?” Noah asks. “No, the devil made the dryer,” Caroline […]
The paradox of seeing world-renowned landmarks, monuments, artworks, and buildings in person is that they tend to look familiar yet strange. Because of all the images you’ve already encountered that depict the famous thing, there’s no mistaking it when you lay eyes on it in three dimensions. But, at the same time, it’s often smaller […]
My husband, Frank, and I have three separate holiday traditions that involve Judy Garland. And yet I balk when anyone suggests I’m a Kinsey 6. The Judy festivities begin on whatever day in early December when we install a Christmas tree and hang our stockings on the bookshelf with care (we don’t have a mantel). […]
I read something at each of my sisters’ weddings. The eldest, whose name is Nicole though everybody in the family calls her Nee, was the first to go. My text was Shakespeare’s sonnet 116: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds” etc. The gist of the poem, according to the commentary in the […]
A few years ago, an editor of the pop-culture site Consequence of Sound asked me to participate in a then-monthly, now-defunct feature where writers contributed personal essays inspired by the tracks of a classic rock album. It was a different album each month, and a different writer was assigned to each track. I wrote a […]
As of this month, I have been keeping a journal for 31 years. Not the same journal, obviously. During those three decades I’ve filled up 14 notebooks, and I’m about halfway through no. 15. This comes out to a little more than two notebooks per year since I got going in October 1988, when I […]
I didn’t start putting styling products in my hair until the summer after my freshman year of college. The next summer I came out of the closet. Make of that what you will. Despite my hair’s gel-free condition in high school, a classmate we’ll call Elizabeth (not her real name) did turn to me one […]
When I visited the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul with my husband, Frank, the Rick Steves guidebook we were using kept encouraging us to interact with merchants and artisans in the enormous market’s “outer fringe,” beyond the tourist- and trinket-filled central zones. Because I am a weak-willed follower who will do anything a book tells me […]
When I was 5, my mother and I planted a vegetable garden in our backyard. Then I broke my arm, leaving her to do most of the weeding. When she tells this story, she acts like I let her down. She’s joking (I think), but it’s also true that the tale’s intermingling of gardening and […]
Indirect Objects 