Like a suitcase, filled with every pain, every trauma, every memory of aloneness, every moment of infant rage….no One is more suited to carry all my pain but myself. To expect others to carry it is a Futile exercise In…

I can remember you coming home from a business trip to Seattle with garbage bags full of backpacking gear. This was before chain stores and internet shopping -- probably sometime in the early 1980s -- and REI was having a…

Back in June, I went to the Rolling Stones concert with a former co-worker. I guess the word “co-worker” makes it sound like it was a business event, but it was purely social. Seeing the Rolling Stones perform has been…

Joy - such a tricky word. For me, anyway. It often sound like too much, too intense. Even the word happiness can sound like too much at times. I usually prefer the word contentment. My mother's middle name was Joy.…

Of course, the natural place to go with the idea of being heated with joy is to sex, and all the greatest adventures, real or fantasized, one has to do with reaching such climactic pleasure, and sweating as a result…

The white kitten meowed at the open window above her. Like she knew Violet was there and wanted her. Something wanted her. The idea that she'd been clinging too that life was pointless dissolved. It hit Violet that without her…

Not long after I met Kenji, the man who would become my husband, on a Friday night just before the holidays took over everyone's lives, he took me to parties all over south of Market, the funky part of San…

These dark mornings, the sky bruised and spent, as though it knows what's coming, the crane fly the most delicate marionette at the upper edge of the window. Is it outside or inside? I wonder idly about the state of…

In my twice-a-week telephone conversations with my demented mother, the most meaningful exchanges are memories of her past. Lately she's been lovingly repeating, "Your father had the most beautiful blue eyes." True. He had strikingly pure blue eyes. And his…

Present socio-political circumstances are indeed a blunt-edged knife. One gigantic scraping tool, edged in trumpian poison ( and I mean trumpian in all its old and modern definitions). The Orange Menace and all his bewildered and bewildering acolytes nibble away…

At dawn, I rise and look to the west. If I see the mountain – and if it’s fog season - I know it’s not too thick or not here at all. If it’s not fog season, I know it’s…

Three nights in a row, after my two sisters and I got back from our trip to Buffalo, I had a dream about my parents. I wish I could remember the first two. But I can't forget the last one.…