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The Church of Menschen (See What I Did There?)

April 14, 2019 in Book Matters, Church Matters, Essays, Etiquette Matters, Spirit Matters, Weather Matters

The “not cute one,” if you can believe them apples.

The great Eve Babitz tells a story of being out one night with a friend who had extreme cheekbones.

It is my opinion that people with extreme cheekbones make all other beauties look like children’s drawings, even if this latest batch of young people don’t seem to recognize this fact and I wouldn’t wish this level of beauty on anyone. I do not say this because I have extreme cheekbones; I have decent ones.

My mother has extreme cheekbones.

Anyway, Eve and this friend were sitting at Barney’s Beanery, because this is where Eve always could be found in her wonderfully misspent youth. And a man approached them. Even a block away it was apparent this man was just the strain of trouble that some extreme beauties seek because everything else is too easy. He was unapologetically drunk, for one thing, and he also had a lot of dark wavy hair and a very arrogant manner. Continue Reading →

The Spark of Darkness

March 31, 2019 in Age Matters, Book Matters, Cat Lady Matters, Essays, Past Matters

Dad and I at Ellis Island Museum, c. 1994

My father and I never talk. This is not an exaggeration. I have not heard his speaking voice in almost a decade. Why this is so is not the stuff of blogs– it’s the stuff of the book–but suffice it to say I always feel my father in the very early morning. He is the only person I know who rises as early as I do though we’ve never discussed that pleasure and perhaps never will. Continue Reading →

Diving Into the Wreck

March 26, 2019 in Book Matters, Cat Lady Matters, City Matters, Spirit Matters

16 at 48.

My eldest goddaughter calls me a “method writer.” By this she means that I experience everything as I write about it and materialize in real-life whatever I author on page. As is often the case, she is absolutely right.

I’ve been thinking about this because I spent the first half of this day writing a scene I’ve desperately avoided writing for two years. It’s about all the stuff I don’t like to think about, let alone read about. And yet the scene demanded to be written.

At heart my book is about post-traumatic growth–the magic that’s conferred when we rise from our own ashes– and you can’t write about such an ascent without first describing the fire.

After I sent in the day’s work I spent an hour curled up in a ball. I was worrying about the impact of these pages on my reader and overwhelmed by the sadness and rage and fear I’d had to unleash. I do not know how to write about pain without experiencing it anew.

For me the the worst thing about writing isn’t the writer’s block (I rarely have it) nor the poverty (though it’s becoming devastating) but that crazy, out-of-control feeling of diving into the biggest and hardest places without someone or something to pull me back out. There I sat in the late afternoon sunlight crying like a Child who had never been rescued. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy