Archive | Spirit Matters

The Future Is Not Plastic

If I’m being honest, I don’t know where my writing is going anymore. Something about turning 50 really called my bluff. Still no book published—nothing published, really, but reviews of others’ work.

I still feel most myself when words are issuing forth. Have since I was a child and first glad-handed a typewriter of my own: sky-blue, in dire need of a new ribbon, snagged at a neighbor’s yard sale. Clickety clack—the world materialized on the page. Abracadabra.

But though I turned 50 with as much fanfare as can be mustered during a pandemic, the aftermath has hit me hard. What I haven’t done by now feels more final, and I’m a girl who has always lived for the horizons. Witness the word “girl.”

What scares me most is the lack of forward motion in my writing career. Oh, the irony of writing about this—meta meta meta and not a drop to drink. Continue Reading →

Beeswax and Other Urban Myths

July 7, 2021 in Age Matters, City Matters, Quoth the Raving, Spirit Matters

Sitting on my stoop, I watch a young woman hurry by.

I call the practice of people-watching “stoop-snooping,” I guess because I’ve done it most while lolling on stoops. My schoolmates recall me watching them from the library stairs, even. (I called that library-stairing.) Watching the world walk by is hands-down one of my favorite activities but since things have opened back up, it’s more charged. I suppose everything has after months of fearing and missing each other in equal parts. Constant life-and-death stakes are not just wearying. They are deteriorating.

Earlier today, my block was abuzz as it has been every day since the café next door re-opened. People drinking espressos, wolfing piadini, cooing over each other’s pets, chattering and clattering over the Italian pop pouring out of the speakers. Now, in what approximates magic hour in these apocalyptic times, the heat is just beginning to abate as the handsome baristas speed off for the night, the last stragglers move into their next NYC dream.

So it’s just the two of us on the street right now–this girl with places to go, and me. She is narrow-framed, long-legged, straight-backed. Wearing no airbuds, wielding no phone. Eyes locked straight ahead, fingers hooked onto the backpack slung over both shoulders, spotless Keds shooting out from neatly creased shorts. She is moving rapidly into her horizon. Continue Reading →