I hate pencils. That scritch on the paper grates on my nerves, and I loathe the forced humility of using one to do a crossword puzzle. A futile rebel, I do mine in ink and make a mess crossing out bad guesses, just to prove…something. No doubt this traces back to the trauma […]
Remember when we fantasized about where we would go to college or who we would marry? Now my sixtysomething cohort fantasizes about where they will retire. And Lord, but my friends are practical. A ranch house, they say, all one floor. Or a “villa”—if ever a word was inflated, it is this one; […]
“The biggest digital growth market in the coming years will probably be artificial friends and partners.” ~The Guardian, July 22, 2024 I have a husband and plenty of friends. But before doubt, angst, and a few medical issues canceled our plans to have kids, I always thought I would want a boy. Eureka! […]
I slice an organic heirloom tomato onto my club sandwich and anemoia engulfs me. My grandpa fed seven kids by opening a tiny grocery store that delivered to the West End mansions, no doubt in an old Model T pulled round to the servants’ entrance. I grew up hearing about the freshest produce […]
“Demure” once meant full-skirted dresses, chaste necklines, low-heeled pumps, and pearls. Sweetness, modesty, a 1950s femininity that did not assert itself. In my all-girls Catholic high school, it was still held up as an ideal in the late 1970s—but by the time we graduated from college, we snorted at the thought. For four […]
God grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference. Who has not needed to hear those words? They were written, elegantly, by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1930s. He was born near here, in Wright City, […]
Steve Vender is a tough, daring private investigator. It feels strangely right that the book most important to him is Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. Vender read Becker in college, long before he found himself hunting witnesses in crack dens. “The people in this place were already dead,” he would realize […]
“She has no inner voice.” A stark sentence, a friend explaining someone’s emotional inconsistency. It stayed with me, stripped of its context, for days. Was it possible to not have an inner voice, a self that was busy connecting experiences and memories, stringing together a continuous personhood? “When the voice that links the […]
As a law student in New York, Jim Clemente had no money for Broadway shows or clubs. “I’d take a milk crate and sit in Times Square and watch people,” he tells me, “trying to figure out who they were, where they were from, and what their stories were.” He had no idea […]
“Oh, it’s just a print,” the homeowner says, waving toward the lithograph’s number and signature. Just a print? Does she realize humans learned to print art long before Gutenberg printed sentences? That printing a woodcut required an engraver to make more than a thousand cuts just to chip out slivers between the crosshatch […]
