This past weekend, my morning reading brought me to a blog post on the New York Times, written by a high school senior, Michael Campbell, about his college search process. As he counts down to receiving decision letters, everywhere he goes he is asked “Where are you going to college?” And of course, it’s too […]
Archives for 2011
Who Haven’t You Met – Yet?
It was worn and fragile, about two inches long, with a brown cover in soft leather. Inside, its translucent pages bore minuscule print which was nonetheless legible – verse after verse, recounting a tale of missed opportunities and lost love. It was Longfellow’s Evangeline. Somewhere, stored in a box in the back of a drawer, […]
Stella Dallas
It stopped me cold, and I couldn’t change the channel. It was Barbara Stanwyck, in 1937’s Stella Dallas, a film I hadn’t seen in years. It’s the story of a working class mother who manages to marry into money, leaves her husband, then raises her daughter under difficult (and questionable) circumstances. Years later, when the […]
Time on Your Hands?
Spare time? Are you kidding? What do you do when your friends or partners can take time off, and you simply can’t? When your schedule is bursting at the seams, even on the weekends? What if you feel like there’s never time to catch up, to take stock, to plan productively, much less to snooze, […]
Pucker Up
How much do you know about your teenager’s social life? How much does he or she know about yours? I can’t remember ever catching one of my sons in a furtive lip lock. (I suspect that both are smart enough to retreat to the leafier areas of our yard, to their rooms, or to a […]
Deal Breakers
A list of non-negotiables before marriage, and maybe after.
Losing Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor – screen legend, world-renowned beauty, Oscar-winning actress – has passed away. She died today, of congestive heart failure, at the age of 79. Like most who recall her in Butterfield 8 or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, we think of her exquisite face and voluptuous body, her smoldering sexuality that heightened extraordinary […]
“I Want to Be Alone”
When time alone feels essential, even in a relationship.
Pacing Yourself
Why you should take your time in a relationship – if you care about it.
Variations on House Jazz for a Lazy Sunday
One. The ginger cat, posing like a sphinx on the gray front stoop, fives and tens stuffed in the glass vase on Mary Jo’s mantel, Michael Royal’s thin fingers on the clean white keys, folding chairs in the red kitchen, in the green salon, on the sloping screen porch, night’s emerging heat, its low music, […]