I’m rethinking an adage I’ve often believed in: you are what you do. The novelist Annie Dillard best encapsulated this concept when she wrote: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” Dillard reinforces the concept that our lives consist of what we do with our time. The word “do” places the spotlight on...
Winter felt long and imagine my pleasure seeing the first brave flowers of spring, these snowdrops stretching and opening between a crack in the rocks. I was so excited I wrote about it. And then visited another harbinger of spring: rabbits. Those darn bunny rabbits ate my pretty flowers down to the bone. “Curse you, dastardly rabbits!” In an earlier era, we didn’t have a rabbit problem. We had...
Nature handed us cold, wind, and rain the entire time, and yet the turnout for Hands Off at the New York State Capitol looked to be several thousand Americans who are sick and tired of an authoritarian administration run by a cruel, amoral, abusive, lying felon and his billionaire enablers. Despite the weather, the crowd was enthusiastic, the signs plentiful and creative. The faces I saw were...
For as long as I’ve been a writer, I’ve kept a notebook, filling dozens of them over the years. Some I still have, others I’ve mislaid or tossed. My notebooks, both the online and paper versions, serve a hybrid function—as a fiction workplace for story ideas, character sketches, plot premises, what-ifs; and also as a therapy couch for my thoughts and feelings, for the highlights and lowlights of...
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is the U.S. scientific and regulatory agency that studies and predicts changes in the environment. The agency’s mission includes weather forecasts, storm warnings, and climate monitoring. Management of coastal and marine ecosystems. Prevention and control of invasive species. International cooperation. NOAA also collects, analyzes, and...
The scent of certain simmering sauce transforms me into that child, that teen, again. I arrive home from school, maybe on a cold, slushy day, I push open the heavy door and immediately I know. My mother turns from the stove in her striped apron and wooden spoon. Sauce tonight. Or it’s a spring day and the windows are open, I’m dragging down the last block to my house after two hours on the water...
It’s never too late to go back to school to learn something new, and with that in mind I enrolled in the UC Berkeley course “Wealth and Poverty” taught by the economist Robert Reich. The course consisted of fourteen lectures, recorded in a classroom at Berkeley in 2023, and is now free to the public. Reich in action teaching his class. Reich worked in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford...
The police stopped by my house today. I happened to be looking out the window when the unmarked sedan pulled into the driveway. I say unmarked because the car didn’t have the aggressive black and white badging of Bethlehem’s patrol cars, although the matte-black Challenger with the extra antenna and “hidden” lights on the grill and inside the windshield is obviously a law enforcement vehicle. Two...
Despite feeling lethargic and unmotivated at the tail end of having Covid (again!), I made my way to downtown Albany because today was 50501—50 protests at 50 state capitals all on 1 day. Living right near a state capital, I felt compelled to show up. It’s been a difficult few months since the election, and an even tougher couple of weeks since the inauguration. Our country has been divided into...
It’s a thrill to discover an artist, writer, or musician for the first time. Yayoi Kusama is a 95-year-old Japanese artist whose installations I experienced at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Throughout a career lasting decades, she has harbored a fascination with polka dots and pumpkins. I can see why those shapes inspire a visual artist. This mirror room with polka dots creates...
One of the most iconic car chase scenes in movie history takes place in the 1968 film Bullitt, starring Steve McQueen as Francisco Police Lieutenant Frank Bullitt. McQueen drives a Mustang GT pursued by a Dodge Charger during a riveting car chase through the hilly, treacherous streets of San Francisco. The streets are so steep that the cars whizzing downhill launch into the air and...
I have this pillow, it has a name: Lumpy, a name Owen came up with some years ago when he used Lumpy as his bed pillow. Folklore has it that Lumpy was my pillow from childhood, and I think I remember this—tucking into bed at night with a heavy pillow that was in parts too crammed with feathers and in other parts lacking, so that my head rested on uneven, contoured terrain, in places soft, in...
It’s May, I’m in sixth grade, I’m on the sidewalk in front of my house on Amherst Street back when we still lived on the busy street. The bridal veil bushes are covered in clusters of white blooms and my parents are sitting on the front porch, drinking coffee in the evening after dinner. I’m throwing a tennis ball against the wooden porch stairs and it bounces back to me. I catch the grounder in...
We’re gathering with friends to ring in the New Year, and with every person I corner into a conversation I bring up the topic of New Year’s Resolutions. You can learn a lot about someone when you ask if they have resolutions. I hear some of the standard popular resolutions: getting more fit, being more mindful and grateful, helping others, spending more time with family, etc. A few of us wanted...
We all read listicles—”The Top Ten This” and “The Eight Ways to Do That.” It’s a popular format in this era of short attention spans. But I have a tip for readers to make listicles even faster and easier to read: skip all the introductory text (such as this paragraph) and go right to the list. There’s rarely any useful information in the introduction. Or you...
