A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
The last time I was back home in Arkansas for a visit, my two younger sisters got into a long-drawn-out debate over the following passage from the instructions for the Rummikub game: In order to make an initial meld, each player must place tiles on the table in one or more sets that total at […]
The dumbest song ever written about Chicago is probably “My Kind of Town,” originally performed by Frank Sinatra in the 1964 Rat Pack musical Robin and the 7 Hoods. Lyricist Sammy Cahn intends to praise the city, but he never gets specific, so he sounds like someone who has never been there. (Jimmy Van Heusen […]
This blog turned 3 years old on August 6. Tradition dictates that I mark the occasion by consulting the Virgilian lottery, a form of soothsaying where you open Virgil’s works at random and whatever passage you land on tells your fortune. I tried the exercise for the very first Indirect Objects post and then again […]
When my husband, Frank, and I lived in New York City, there wasn’t room in our apartment for a dining table. As a matter of fact, there was barely room for our 15-pound dog. But moving to a bigger place here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, gave us an excuse to acquire more furniture to fill up […]
Provided there’s no plague on, my husband, Frank, and I take a Big Trip each year. It’s unlikely to be the only journey we undertake from January through December, but the annual Big Trip does occupy the central position in our travel calendar. The Big Trip tradition began in 2009, when we went to Paris […]
Did you know I’ve written like a million theater reviews? Back when I lived in Chicago, that was a side gig of mine. Most of my bylines appeared in the Chicago Reader, to which I contributed pieces of performing arts journalism on a weekly basis from 2005 to 2016. Then I moved to New York. […]
On the day before I was supposed to fly home to Arkansas with my husband, Frank, to spend Christmas with my family, I tested positive for Covid-19. Consequently, we had to cancel that trip as well as another one scheduled for the following week. The plan was to fly from Arkansas to Puerto Rico, where […]
On the front of the holiday card my husband, Frank, and I sent out this year there are five photos meant to represent our 2021. Here’s what the images depict: us in Boston Common ‘cause we moved to the Boston area over the summer Frank in his doctoral robes before his graduation ceremony after completing […]
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 […]
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 […]
Indirect Objects 