Photo by James Wood, on an iPhone. Full Moon, approx 6:20pm. Grace looks simultaneously like a baby and like a teenager to me. I like the blurry, atmospheric effect James is working in the bottom 1/3 of the photo. Email this post
This Eddie Vedder soundtrack from Into the Wild just keeps growing on me (also have been listening to Juno constantly). I particularly like the songs Rise and Guaranteed. Lyrics to Guaranteed: On bended knee is no way to be free Lifting up an empty cup, I ask silently All my destinations will accept the one [...]
I think I mentioned that I recently reread The Great Gatsby. I really enjoyed it, underlining and writing in the margins in a way I don’t usually do. And then today I found this quotation by Zelda, whom I’ve always adored. I don’t know much about her, but I love the legend she’s become: a [...]
Snow day yesterday. It was really coming down in the morning, and by the afternoon the world had the snow-glazed beauty that I associate with a day apart from regular life. Somehow the world stops, or at least slows down dramatically, on days like this. No school, meetings cancelled, no cars parked on the major [...]
I’m crying and I’m laughing and I’m sad that it’s over. The Middle Place is everything I anticipated and more. Mostly, it’s unexpectedly light – easy and fun to read, like talking to your dearest friend about her family that you grew up with too. I told a friend I was reading a book about [...]
“George Orwell once said something about how childhood necessarily creates a false map of the world but it’s the only map we’ve got … and no matter how old we are, at the first sign of trouble, we take off running for those fabulous countries. It’s like that for me.” Preface to The Middle Place, [...]
It’s official. I am taking Whit’s changing table apart (and posting it on www.freecycle.org). I remember carrying this thing upstairs when I was about 8 months pregnant with Grace, and assembling it myself in the empty nursery.A passage indeed! Email this post
Run, don’t walk. That’s all I have to say. I have just started The Middle Place and already I have tears running down my face. Kelly is a master. She is like your funnier, more articulate, wiser best friend. She’s also born on August 16th. What else do you need to know? Email this post
“The idea that some lives matter less than others is the root of all that’s wrong with the world.” A closing quote in Mountains Beyond Mountains, which I finished this morning. The sentiment encapsulates Paul Farmer’s guiding philosophy (in my view). Tracy Kidder does a marvelous job portraying Farmer as a real man, full of [...]
Found a list on a New York Times blog of the best British writers since 1945 (or some such date). I was frankly surprised to see Philip Larkin at the top of the list. I’ve long loved him, and his peers, in what I think of as a generation of plain-spoken British poets, Auden, Heaney, [...]
