Monthly Archives: January 2012

I had cabin fever all day today. The world is iced over; it’s treacherous to walk outside without crampons. Yesterday, it was bitterly cold and windy, but, creatures of habit, we tried to take our usual walk to the main … Continue reading →

I spent the summer of 2002 training for the New York City marathon. I had never run before, or rather, I hadn’t run since I’d been on the track team in junior high. I was doing this because I thought … Continue reading →

In the early 70s, my family used to go camping in Mexico with a group of my mother’s graduate school friends. Our 1973 blue Dodge station wagon joined the caravan down to Puerto Penasco, Rocky Point, on the Sea of … Continue reading →

Last night, on the last leg of my delayed, rebooked, rerouted plane trip home, the woman in the seat directly behind me talked for 2 hours straight in a loud, shrill, strident, sloshy-drunk voice – at the gate, during announcements, … Continue reading →

At just after 10 this morning, I said goodbye to Brendan and Dingo at Departures drop-off and went inside to the United check-in kiosks to learn that my flight had been canceled, or postponed, they weren’t sure which, due to … Continue reading →

The drive from the farmhouse in New Hampshire to the center of Montreal takes exactly four hours. The other day, we loaded Dingo and some bags into our Subaru Outback, the official, mandatory automobile of northeastern New England, and set … Continue reading →

I was a short-order cook for a few months through the winter of 1986 and into the early summer of 1987, at Roxy Hearts World Diner in Portland, Oregon, a silver-chrome-and-red-Naughahyde, vintage-movie-poster-decorated little place on Burnside, in the Pearl District, … Continue reading →

My father grew up in Lake Elmo, Minnesota. When he was in his mid-20s, he got his girlfriend pregnant. She was, literally, the girl next door – her family lived just down the lake from his family. Because they were … Continue reading →

In the months after the Twin Towers fell on September 11th, I started the novel that would be The Epicure’s Lament. I was writing it to cheer myself up; I was undergoing a kind of internal, shell-shocked, nerve-wracked breakdown, and … Continue reading →

Back in 1980, the year Lennon was shot and Reagan was elected for the first time, it was still fairly safe for teenage girls to hitchhike around Europe. I hitched to the South of France and later Paris with my … Continue reading →