Valentine’s has always been unfortunate. The circumstances always come up oil-soaked, and I like discarding it in a trash bin with the previous day’s eggshells and paper towels.  On Valentine’s two years ago I accidentally hit someone with my car. It wasn’t a grand, awful collision, only me coming home from work, late at night,…

When Joan Didion wrote, “The wind shows us how close to the edge we are,” she made observations in the analytical, philosophical, eye-opening way Didion had a penchant for. And when I read it first, where and when I can’t remember, though I think there was a classroom with glossy wood desks and brick walls,…

Once a month — sometimes twice, I find myself in a great deal of pain.  Most people with a uterus know what I’m referring to: the monthly shedding of the uterine lining and hormone fluctuations that bring about mood swings, cravings, headaches, back pain, and the most dreaded, for me, cramps.  I do not recall…

For the past three months, I’ve been living with an extra mattress. It sits there against the wall of my barely three-yards-wide bedroom, leaning and taking up a foot of floor space. It’s a replica of the one I sleep on but newer and wrapped in plastic.  I run into it occasionally or turn my…

A term is often used to describe those Jews who do not attend Shabbat services every Friday or Saturday (or both). Who do not find themselves acting out any religious pomp and circumstance any time during the year, except during Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and ten days later, on Yom Kippur, the Jewish…

September 11, 2001 — I am just over four months old. No memories can stick, and consciousness is a problem for a later time. My grandmother lives on Allen Street in New York City, and she watches from her window where the Twin Towers are perfectly framed as they fall. She wonders about my uncle,…

A vignette… I am a California Girl. And like California Girls are wont to do, when the day is stressful, when the sun is out and the sky is perfectly blue, we run to the beach.  I drive in my little white car down backroads because the highway won’t take me there, and I park…

SoFi Stadium, August 9th, 2023 I wouldn’t consider myself a Swiftie. Not just because I dislike that word, it scratches at the ears, but because for a long time I’ve lacked an understanding of the absolute adoration that surrounded the Taylor Swift. Her specific brand of white feminism and pop songs played non-stop on the…

It is common for the months of June to August, summertime in steady heat and oak smelling evenings, wistful nights and grass pressing our feet — to be characterized in a certain way, depending on the year, the social landscape, the historical ramifications.  Summer of 2020 was COVID, we were locked inside making sourdough, whipping…