Monthly Archives: October 2014

Sprinting alone through Manhattan’s Upper East Side in the rain after wandering through the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a couple of hours, I realized I felt something rare – exhilaration.  I wasn’t dressed for running, of course.  Who is when they truly need to be?  I knew my cute little walk-around flats would be ruined, my jeans were soaked, my hair was plastered to my head (not a good look for me), and the umbrella I’d bought from a street vendor had, of course, imploded upon opening, sending me into a fit  of laughter, which, believe you me, cleared a wide space around me.  New Yorkers, en masse, deal well with crazy, but I think the laughter at the immediately broken umbrella was beyond their scope of comprehension.

What those skeptical New Yorkers couldn’t know was that my soul was singing simply because I was in NYC, where dreams are made, where people flood for the mere wisp of a chance at their heart’s desire.  It’s the penultimate city of infinite hope, a city that truly rises from the ashes and says, You won’t defeat us. Continue reading →

I have two men in my life under the age of 12, two fine-boned, beautiful, hyperactive, hard to control, leave-you-pulling-your-hair-out- by-the-roots men: Auz who just turned 11, and Z who is still platinum blond when his military-style “high and tight” clipper cut grows out.  (If you’re new to me, thanks for reading, but lest you think there is something incredibly wrong here, I must explain Auz and Z are my nephews.  All clear?  Great!)   Z’s the one with the startling tiger eyes, so like my brother, gold and unsettling, beautiful but with an undercurrent that whispers of the dark and dangerous depths of the jungle.  As different as night and day, and completely formed individual personalities, sometimes it is a joy to be with them together, and sometimes, well, not so much. Continue reading →

Last weekend I spent 5 lovely, almost relaxing days in Tucson with my family.  You must understand that my parents are extremely recent East Coast transplants who chose to leave their 20+ year community and their 20+ year friends as well as my 35 year old sister, Leah,  behind for the sake of being close to their two other children and their likely-to-be-only grandchildren under the age of twenty (My brother has been the only one to take up that mantle of be fruitful and multiply, but not for the lack of trying, mind you.).  Haven’t yet decided when the Wrath of Leah will descend on my parents or in what form, but you can bet that, oh, it’s a-comin’.  My vote?  A small intimate wedding, perhaps or elopement that the whole family knows nothing of until we see her on Facebook 7-8 months pregnant, and then it’ll be a breezy, by-the-way mentioned in passing sort of thing; my sister has always heard her own drumbeat and followed, and in a way I envy that non-conformist attitude.  But, then again, she has always had to learn her lessons the hard as titanium way (Don’t we all?), but sometimes the lessons don’t sink in, don’t penetrate that carefully constructed and precisely honed chainmail exterior.  And, thus, the inevitable  need to repeat itself. Continue reading →