Navigation

Archive | City Matters

My Saucepan, My Solace

March 26, 2021 in Age Matters, Cat Lady Matters, City Matters, Essays, Quoth the Raving, Ruby Intuition, Spirit Matters

The only regret I have about never getting married is I never got the wedding registry.

For a Capricorn I’m not much of a materialist, but the easiest way to my heart is great homeware. I have a suitor who buys me expensive kitchen appliances whenever he wants to get back in my pants. I won’t say whether it works, but mostly I’m limited to this writer’s income when it comes to cooking equipment. The bulk of my dishes are unmatched, chipped thrift store finds because I can’t bear the unseemliness of low-end, mass-produced sets. Continue Reading →

A Galaxy of Cousins

March 23, 2021 in Age Matters, Cat Lady Matters, City Matters, Country Matters, Essays, Ruby Intuition, Spirit Matters

The last 24 hours have been such a perfect distillation of my life, not just through Covid, but the life I had beforehand and perhaps the life to which I will return.

Continue Reading →

Still Growing in Brooklyn

March 16, 2021 in Book Matters, City Matters, Quoth the Raving, Ruby Intuition

Today, for the first time in 12 months, I went to my local library, which only reopened last week. It’s the branch featured in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and I love it so much that I’ve run a free cinema club in its basement for local retirees. (Lots of Fred and Ginger.) The setup is still bare bones–you can only return books and pick up ones that you’ve reserved in advance–but just stepping into its atrium was so joyful that I burst into tears as soon as I sniffed its familiar scent of paste and paper. “Our favorite patron returns!” sang one librarian as I took a masked bow. But besides bragging about my library celeb status (arguably the highest status of them all), the reason I am sharing this story is because I wanted to confess I pulled a total Grace Paley. Which is to say: dropped off Reckless Daughter, David Yaffe’s biography of Joni Michell–and then immediately checked it back out. Apparently a year is not long enough to absorb the beautiful mystery that is Joni. Hello, my life.

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