Grateful just to be somewhere beautiful and air-conditioned, I stand and skim, as is my sinful habit, the big introduction label to the Saint Louis Art Museum’s Nubia exhibit. I feel the usual distance of centuries and miles; nothing lives in my memory about Nubia, no peg on which I can hang a […]
I so enjoyed Dr. Rebecca Copeland’s mystery, The Kimono Tattoo, that I wanted to solve the next mystery. Not the sequel (though she is writing one) but the motive. What gave a midwestern university professor the nerve to take this chance? She plunged herself into a world of ancient artistry, then translated its […]
Ah, Westminster! Where else can a trapezoidal head, or an egg-shaped one, be a mark of honor? Dogs are my favorite sport, and dog shows one of its spectacles. I watch rapt, drinking in the elegant curve of a whippet’s underside, the big soft eyes of the Pyrenees, the romp of a giant […]
The metal bench is branding the underside of my thighs—I can almost hear the sizzle—and the dog is pacing, lifting each paw the second he sets it down. Necessity has forced my husband into Walmart, an experience he assiduously avoids, and we are waiting for him outside in the heat of the […]
In my years as a Catholic, I watched, riveted, as the priest elevated the host, the wafer as round and large and luminous as a distant moon. While he murmured the Eucharistic prayer, I thought about a gentle, scruffy, bearded, dark-skinned carpenter breaking flatbread for loyal friends, pouring wine from an earthen jug, […]
My mother talked a lot about Maria Montessori. She could not afford to send me to a Montessori school, so she read all about Dr. Montessori’s work and figured out ways to apply her method at home. Looking back, I suspect that even the way she put milk into little pitcher small enough […]
I keep rereading what is now old news, those amazing stories about the French Open. Not the stories of grand slams and surprise victories, but the stories about sensible withdrawals. I want them to mean more than they do, on the surface. I want them to herald a widespread return of common […]
The dog inches closer, then leaps backward. Scared by a goose feather because its soft brownish gray tip moved in the breeze. Trying not to laugh, I tug him forward. Another goose feather lays on the lakeside path. Then another. They would be beautiful in that Art Nouveau vase, I […]
The police officers approached, scanning the car lot. Blue Earth County Dispatch had received quite a few 911 calls about a woman—clearly under some sort of influence—jumping in and out of vehicles. At least one caller noted that she seemed “happy.” It was 1:30 p.m.—broad daylight, nothing narrow or furtive about it. The […]
It has been said, scathingly, by dispirited critics, that Shakespeare’s King Lear is simply too big for the stage. It is impossible to do the play’s sweeping themes justice in a single production. Maybe so. But I just sat in the breeze at Forest Park and watched the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival mount a […]
