Life’s relationship experience: refilling the personal trust fund after loss or betrayal.
Letting Go
Reinvention through dreams of life before and after divorce, processing the post-marital landscape.
Triangle
It is the low-pitched and rolling brogue that startles me, and I look up. I hadn’t heard him enter the living room. “Surprised to see me?” he asks, cocking that irrepressible eyebrow that makes a woman’s heart beat faster, like everything else about him. I’m not sure what to say. I am surprised to see […]
Calling for the Tow Truck
“You have an idea parked in your head now,” he murmured. And he was right. It was one of those perfectly reasonable and measured conversations, romantic even, that had taken a strange and unanticipated turn. What he intended as simple disclosure of something in the past triggered a surprising chain reaction. In me. It was […]
Magnani, Manolo, and Where’s My Life of French Chic?
Anna Magnani was peeling herself out of a black satin slip, splashing in a small fountain, and sputtering in Italian while the women on the street around her were trying on clothing. Furiously. It was all very Filene’s Basement. The original – in the 1960s. But what was an Italian film icon doing in the […]
Constraints and Open Spaces
I dream a problem to solve: I need a small parking area for my fleet of six jets, he tells me. I am standing in a mall lot, on the upper deck, in the middle of a city. The site includes a spiral ramp on one side, and a poorly lit corner bounded by a […]
Cynical, skeptical, or cautious?
We had both been waiting at the hospital for three hours. She’s a registered nurse, and was even more annoyed than I was. “I don’t know what could be taking so long for a few simple tests,” she says. “A little blood work and the basics. This is a woman’s clinic now.” I am sitting […]
Lucid Dreaming
My younger son leans back in his chair at the dinner table and reaches over to the bookcase. He slips out a glossy paperback and begins flipping through it. “Why do you have a book on dream analysis?” he asks. My son doesn’t normally initiate a discussion. This is a pleasant change. Oh that, I […]
Bette, Joan, Anne. Excedrin.
Bette Midler was in the crowd just in front of me. She looked fab – about 15 years younger, hair the color of flames. She was mouthing off to Joan Rivers who was laughing and dropping a few sarcastic lines of her own. They disappeared into the throng of people pushing through revolving doors, as […]
Yellow shirts. Red wine. Squirrels on the roof.
Billboard from IKEA. Clouds like cobblestones against an inky sky. A train passes; we pick up speed, underground again, lights reflecting against windows. So few people. Behind me now. I feel him behind me now. It’s late. White shirts, blank faces, no babies or commuters. More white shirts. Good, I think he’s leaving. My black […]