Recent Posts

I spent Mother’s Day weekend in New York City doing exactly what I wanted to do. It was the opposite of mothering. If there is ever a good time to leave your kids, this wasn’t it. End of school assignments and exams are looming. Tensions run higher in May than they do in December. But… Read more

I am all or nothing.Everything I do is all or nothing.I either eat the whole hog until I’m sick, or I starve myself until I’m dead on the sidewalk with a small plate of bacon next to me. There is no in between. And even though I know I am this way, and even though… Read more

Grief is an animal.It greets you differently every time you meet it. You can try to meet it on your terms and with your timing. You can go prepared. You can bargain and bribe and bestow. But it’s an animal. It’s totally unpredictable. Today is a big day on my grief calendar. But so far… Read more

I had a bite of French toast in my mouth this morning when I glanced up at the TV in the corner of the diner. A reporter stood in the snow wearing a parka. The headline was snow related. And the weather map was snow related, showing all the places that were under a thick,… Read more

My kitchen is a place of mystery. It shouldn’t be that way, because it is MY kitchen. But I’m a person that skips over the things I don’t know and tries to glean the meaning through context. That works well enough in stories with simple plots. It’s less effective when you have to eat your… Read more

They say that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. My preacher recently pointed out that the road to Heaven is also paved with good intentions. It’s what you DO on each road that matters. If the heat you’re packing is only the intent, you might be on the wrong road. I’ve been… Read more

I went to Bowling Green to cry. That’s not what I would have said I was there to do. That’s not what I even believed I was there to do. But that is what I did. Seven months to the day after I helped memorialize my best and oldest friend, Jennifer, I went to see… Read more

I slapped my boy hard in the face on the day of his high school graduation. That was Saturday.But to be fair, he asked me to. His was the first ceremony of the day, which meant that alarms were going off in the house by 6 a.m. that morning. I was the only one hearing… Read more

Life is absurd and beautiful and funny. I tend to focus on the absurd. My whole life I’ve been laughing at my own mistakes. Pointing them out early on saves me the shock of the old lady stranger in Costco coming out of nowhere to tell me that 90% of the warehouse heard me fawning… Read more

Plate Full O’ Lettuce My friend, Melissa, is good with old people. She always has been. She has had a long career as a speech pathologist in a nursing home, dealing with people who, from what I can determine, mostly just choke on rice. But speech pathology is not where she spends most of her… Read more