“Go and visit that feverish and dreamy city.” ~ Georgio de Chirico New York has been the center of the world (one of the centers? It would say otherwise) for a rather long time. Just the city’s name means things—variously defined—to people all over the world. This was truest in the twentieth […]
My younger son likes to cook and has an interest in those who work in kitchens for a living. He loved the Marco Pierre White memoir Devil in the Kitchen, and the movie Burnt, said to be inspired in part by White. Recently he turned me on to the Hulu series The Bear, about […]
One of this summer’s big exhibits at the Cooper Hewitt, America’s design museum, explores “the unique role design can play in pursuing peace.” How many people will hear that and roll their eyes? So often, the visual arts either content themselves with dark, bitter commentary or stay out of the fray altogether. The […]
Penises are exploding all over the news cycle. At second glance, though, two are the same article, “Inside the Secretive World of Penile Enlargement,” co-published by Pro Publica and The New Yorker. (The New York Times piped up a few days earlier to tell us about a newly approved gel that “helps men […]
My calm Midwestern life has been punctuated by three precious trips to New York, a city of dashes and exclamations. Also a city of jazz, though I never seem to be there with anyone willing to go listen. This time, I resolved to go alone. I had one night free. And I lucked […]
Wherever you start from, Hammond, Indiana, is far away. Having spent the time to drive up the interstates, past the Chicago Transit Authority Repair Shop and the Norfolk Southern Railroad Calumet Yard, over the Calumet River, along the Chicago Skyway Toll Road, past the Hammond Port Authority and the Water Works, under the […]
I am back from a glorious week in New York, and the dog is throwing up. I need to do a boatload of laundry, make pesto before the basil bolts, type up three fat notebooks scribbled during the trip, pick up library books, grocery shop, and make a colonoscopy appointment. My husband hears me […]
I am handy at finding right words for right places, often by intuition and sometimes by a dim sense of the rags of poetry in them. When a word comes to mind that seems odd for the context, I look at its archaic meanings before I discard it in case it can convey […]
It has been years. Decades, in fact. Yet my car zips into the drive-through without hesitation. Not even glancing at the menu, I order myself a cone. Vanilla, not enrobed in chocolate or busted up with nuts. No husband nearby to arch an eyebrow, no dog to insist on sharing. I skid into […]
Kevin is a peacock who ranges freely among several farms in rural Southern Illinois. “Kevin is nuts,” says Lee, who lives on one of the farms. “He likes to boss the chickens around.” Kevin “belongs” to the farm family across the county road and fields. Lee hears that people think peacocks are pretty, […]
