Mortal
The way forward is with a broken heart. –Alice Walker (With thanks to Elizabeth Bishop, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Sinatra and W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan) I was the myth you stole from the twenty-second floor of my apartment building overlooking Long Island Sound and the Orchard Beach of my childhood growing umbrellas and empty beer […]
Leona Canyon Open Space Preserve
Down the stairs of my condominium and across Campus Drive to Leona Canyon Open Space Preserve. In April and May, I canter past an expanse of wild radish and California golden poppies, and beyond a pond that is lined in cattails and home to a changing family of mallards whose ducklings hide behind the rushes. […]
24-Hour Fitness
Ellipticals, treadmills, exercise bikes, pick my way through a forest of equipment gauge how close or far I wish to be from monitors displaying talk shows, cooking programs, sports, news, no intelligence, mute turned on, stake out a machine near the Barefoot Contessa spray disinfectant on a brown paper towel wipe the machine from its […]
Ghosts: Sequel 2
She pointed to the bronze and wooden statuettes. The fact that she didn’t think the ghost was my husband, interested me while at the same time, I was happy he wasn’t messing with her mind. His own mind occupied a world of special relationships, mathematical probabilities especially about chess, an analytical cast inherited from his […]
Ghosts: Sequel 1
My mouth dropped. Never had I expected her to utter those words. “Yes,” I said, feeling an immediate kinship with a woman who was standing in front of me on the cement pavement at the bottom of the driveway of my old house where I had raised my children and where she now lived. “When […]
Ghostly Relationships
Down a driveway of cement cobblestones, I talked to her about ghosts. Cam was my height, which means short, mostly black hair gathered in a ponytail, silver and grey on top bordered by red and blue streaks. She was Asian, maybe Vietnamese, renting a basement room, which at various times had served as my son […]
Pygmalion
two angels sit on steps regenerating the third a look-out for whatever got them into this mess— a rag of wings a bindle of legs angels on a goof setting off a debate whose bright idea the whole thing had been anyway, to forsake a clock tower several blocks away from where they’d offered free target […]
Coupon Queen
A neighbor knocked on my door and asked for drug money; actually I don’t know she’s my neighbor at all except last year, a few weeks before Christmas, I sat in the car hoping to start it, and she came over and said, “Hi, I’m your neighbor.” That was news to me. “Can you lend […]
Lake Merritt Autumn Lights Festival, 2014
They appeared as strangers do from a stone pathway– a Moth Princess in a gauze gown, flaming calla lilies, electric fireflies, sea glass lamps shuddering in the light of the garden– and when we finally left, it seemed as though the whole world lit by one branch could never go out.
Robin Williams Plays a Homeless Man
what a Chabad past telephone poles to the top of the World Trade Tower brought me back down to earth thinking it wasn’t me who blew out the candles