I’m built like a mullet. Business in the front, party in the back. What is it about an awkward ten-or-eleven-year-old that screams, “please call attention to my body?” That was the time when my body started developing; my family fretted that I might be swaybacked and admonished me to stand up straight. At dances, the [...]
My grandmother’s mother, Mary Salter, is a mysterious fruit on our family tree, not quite shaded in. We know very little about her; she died around 1930, leaving two little girls under four who would torture themselves, for the rest of their lives, trying to remember her face. Family lore suggests that Mary was a [...]
Yeah it’s still the same Can’t you feel the pain When the needle hits the vein Ain’t nothing like the real thing Yesterday, I ran across the Golden Gate Bridge and back. At Vista Point, where you can actually see how ridiculously photogenic San Francisco can be, and how clever it was of Irving Morrow [...]
I am sitting in my house, alone. Lunches have been made, children have been dressed in ironic thrift-store T-shirts, a husband wore his new socks today. The coffeemaker clicks, periodically, to remind me that it is there, waiting, and that the fair-trade coffee boiling away on the hot plate isn’t going to chug itself. The [...]
Mad Men is back! And so is Mad Men blogging. Yay! As I did last year, I will be blogging the food and drink of Mad Men. (In a departure from last year, I do not plan to be so overwhelmed by all the themed cooking and cocktails that I completely miss the last post [...]
It was unseasonably hot. That must have been the reason my grandmother walked down the aging basement stairs and out of the open garage door and traveled a block to the corner store, holding my three-year-old hand in hers. The giddy excitement of the moment still stays with me; the black night sky, like a [...]
I love buying yarn “with a story,” whether that means a percentage of the proceeds go towards helping refugees in Darfur or the yarn is handspun by at-risk youth thirty miles from my house. The story makes me feel good about buying yet another skein of yarn, and, when I knit a project out of [...]
Passover is almost over. For the first time since 2001 or thereabouts, I did not host a Passover Seder. (I attended two seders, both of which were lovely.) I did not cook an unforgivably unpalatable kosher-for-passover dessert, nor did I set a glass of water beside Elijah’s cup for Miriam, nor did I explain the [...]
This is how to make collard greens. First, my grandfather drives his truck to the Alemany Farmer’s Market. My grandfather chooses a bunch of taut, bitter leaves, and he puts money in the dirt-caked, stubby-fingered hand of the farmer who planted the seeds, and he brings home the collards to my grandmother to cook. But [...]
I was raised to believe I could keep bad things from happening to me, as a woman, if I just followed certain rules. The women in my life, trying, no doubt, to protect me, taught me these rules. When a woman was abducted and killed while leaving a nighttime party in a miniskirt, I was [...]
