Blog : Beautiful-Things
Soft Spot
| October 30, 2017 A few weeks into my second son's infancy, I've noticed that when the lighting and angle are perfect, I can see his pulse on top of his head, at the place where the bones haven't yet fused....
Signs
| October 23, 2017 In the final week of my mother's life, a duck and her ducklings traveled by her bedroom window in a wobbly caravan, declining in number with each daily pass. (The cats, I suspect: ruthless.)...
Did You Notice Me?
| October 16, 2017 Aunt Beverly was not my aunt at all. She was the family hairdresser and a friend of my mother's. She believed in God, but her allegiance was firstly to those around her...
Mentor of Cool
| October 9, 2017 There were Beatniks and wannabes like me in 1959 Portland coffeehouses. We sipped espressos and listened to cool jazz, whatever that was. Too young and inexperienced to distinguish authentic from pretentious, I tried, impossibly, to be cool.
The Lesson
| October 2, 2017 Only after the starter gun's snap, did my father burst from the port-a-potty...
Grateful
| September 25, 2017 My boyfriend's Grandad is ninety-one. I met him after dementia had wrested his control of the family business and emptied his mind of vocabulary...
Mountains (repeat)
| September 18, 2017 It is always almost raining. That's something they never tell you about Seattle; they talk about the rain, but not the days the air holds its breath...
Filling Cupboards
| September 11, 2017 You don't start out with coffee cups. You start with single-serve espressos and chai lattes at the coffee shop around the corner from your co-op. But a coffee together after work becomes morning coffee for two. And, suddenly, you've moved in together and have cupboards to fill....
Essay for My Five-Year-Old Daughter
| September 4, 2017 You wanted me to find you. So I interrogated the avocado tree, searched behind the broken Virgin Mary statue. Finally, I asked the sky for help...
River
| August 28, 2017 It's after the intersection and just over the very small incline that the river first comes into view. The Boston skyline expands to my right, casting its shadow on the water.
Eavesdropping In Arizona
| August 14, 2017 "When you hear this language, you hear heaven," the bishop says. Smoldering frankincense snakes its way upward as the golden censer sways, riding the waves of chants sung from memory, from the marrow.
Night Song
| August 7, 2017 At the end of a raw, rainy day, I sit cross-legged in meditation on my bedroom floor, breathing in, breathing out, letting worry and weight dissolve into diminishing light.
The Museum of Broken Relationships (repeat)
| July 31, 2017 There's this letter on the wall in there that a young boy writes to a young girl during the Bosnian War. They meet at gunpoint, marching toward a van that will drive them to a war camp.
Here's What Happens (repeat)
| July 24, 2017 HERE'S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU'RE WAITING FOR MORE TEST RESULTS FOR THE SUSPICIOUS SHADOW ON YOUR HUSBAND'S CHEST X-RAY:
Holy, Holy, Holy
| July 17, 2017 On the morning after my mother's sudden death, before I was up, someone brought a basket of muffins, good coffee beans, and a bottle of cream-- real cream, unwhipped-- left them at the back door, and tiptoed away. I couldn't eat.
Reincarnation
| July 3, 2017 A radio interviewer asks an aging mystic, "What will you miss the most when you leave this world?"
Suspension
| June 26, 2017 We paddle to our campsite under blue skies, glancing at the horizon. Thunderheads boil upward from three directions.
Two Degrees
| June 19, 2017 I had to look it up in my old physics notebook, exhumed from its tomb of an ancient cedar chest and kept all these years as a talisman for time travel that the Internet could never touch.
Dinner Talk
| June 12, 2017 The asparagus grew in the Sicilian garden, and my mother made frittata that was sometimes lunch, sometimes dinner, sometimes snack...
This Is It
| June 5, 2017 1998. We stole it at night, one of us running across a lawn we had scoped out beforehand. With a firm kick, I popped it out neatly and ran away with it under my arm like a football, never really breaking my stride. The runaway car was there, waiting...
Shame and Drum
| May 22, 2017 In the Midwestern auditorium, a tired Richard Ford reads a fiction about Grand Central Station to a ticketed crowd as tired and sparse as his scalp. He is old and disappointed, and he is reading about old disappointment...
What Matters
| May 15, 2017 Thursday is "Cosmic Night" at the space centre. I am waiting for three friends by the giant crab outside. The late George Norris designed the twenty-foot sculpture. Stainless steel pincers grasp for the sky.
Yield
| May 8, 2017 Waiting at a red light after dropping off videos. I've nosed my car onto the cross walk, hoping it will trigger the light to change more quickly...
YES
| May 1, 2017 Anthony’s text just says, “YES.” I’ve decided to change my flight to Boston, to move it up five days. He’s floundering, just doesn’t sound right; the 25th could be too late. Sooner. Have to get there sooner...
Kinetic Energy
| April 24, 2017 Weeks after California first legalized queer marriages but before the voters snatched them away in 2008, my girlfriend introduced me to the dyke march...
Saturday Night
| April 17, 2017 Every day I flash on scenes and sounds of Fallujah. There are ways of grounding them...
Kerria
| April 10, 2017 “Cheerful!” she said, “What is it?” Then recognizing the compact rows of marigold trophies lining spray upon spray arcing over the yard, “Oh, kerria, that was my mother’s favorite.” A moment of silence for one mother’s mother gone twenty years...
