Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Did you have a baby doll, once?
I had lots of baby dolls. Orange Blossom I received the Christmas my little sister turned one; when you squeezed her stomach she “blew” orange-scented kisses. And Martha Jean (renamed after my grandmother), my first treasured Cabbage Patch Kid.
Eventually, these dolls were lost to history, so to speak. I [...]
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
My favorite photograph of my grandfather depicts a little boy, three or four, dressed in tattered clothes beside a dusty Model T Ford. He looks grim and determined. My grandmother said the first time she saw the picture it made her cry.
There were many reasons my grandfather left Arkansas for San Francisco, and there are [...]
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
I think I found Laurie R. King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, completely by accident, while searching for some book — any book — about Sherlock Holmes.
(My last years in high school were the height of my Sherlock Holmes obsession. Once I had read Arthur Conan Doyle’s canonical mysteries a hundred times, I started looking for other [...]
“Did Adam have good clothes to wear on Sundays?” Laura asked Ma.
“No,” Ma said. “Poor Adam, all he had to wear was skins.”
Laura did not pity Adam. She wished she had nothing to wear but skins.
– Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House In The Big Woods
Ramona Quimby, who appears twenty years later, owes much to Laura [...]
“She was such a little girl that one did not expect to see such a look on her small face. It would have been an old look for a child of twelve, and Sara Crewe was only seven. The fact was, however, that she was always dreaming and thinking odd things and could not herself [...]
When I was four years old, I lived, briefly, with my mother and stepfather, in a tiny house near Lake Merritt. It was a cottage with hardwood floors, painted pale blue. Coming, as I did, from the City, I was enchanted by the trellis covered in fragrant honeysuckle, and the bamboo in the yard that [...]
A Theme has been chosen! March is Women’s History Month, and, with an eye to women past, present, and future, this month’s posts (yes! Posts plural!) will be devoted to heroines of the fictional variety.
I’ll begin at the beginning, with my favorite childhood literary heroines. Dorothy Gale will kick off, and we’ll pick up more [...]
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(heard) Middlemarch
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