Should I add “er?” I am already old. My friend Pam, with whom I’ve been living, eating, writing with for the past week and a half, just turned my exact age. We have been friends since 10th grade, when we…

Agatha was hungry. Despite her toils all summer in a garden in the back of Frau Bleich’s home, she still did not have enough vegetables to eat. In October 1916, all of Germany was hungry. The British blockage and the…

My husband Kenji and I call them The Hedonists – the lively, partying combo of two families that took me in decades ago, including me in their Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day, Easter, the launch of the…

That soft smile coming slowly to my lips, practicing the feeling of happiness now, to be ready for the sadness I know to come. One, in spite of the other. Fuck off, be gone. You are so petty and small…

I always wondered how the Holocaust could have happened, how the world let 2.7 million Jews be murdered for cruelty's sake. I imagined it as some kind of equivocation followed by an affirmative decision. "Yes, let's allow this," everyone said…

“It’s the happy heart that breaks, isn’t it?” Delia pushed away her plate where the scone—one I’d just baked and brought over to her—was largely crumbled and largely uneaten. Her discarding of something I’d particularly shopped for – the currents,…

Agatha and Andres fell into a sort of rhythm. Their days were distinctly not intellectual—no books, no museums, no art. Agatha and Andres were grounded in the practical. “What day shall I come to the White House for dinner?” “What…

"The Valkyries ticket website is glitching. You'll receive another email from me with your ticket link. You'll need the Ticketmaster app and the Golden State Warriors app." A warrior myself—an event warrior, that is, going out almost every night—I already…

We? I don’t know what “we” I’d include here. Partners? Husbands? It was hardly perfection we were after; it was . . . what? Harmony, maybe (although that word was never used). Happiness. Love. Those were the wor. Forget “perfection.”…

Wow. Finally, a good date. There must be a news outlet I can call. It's such a hot item: "Woman Over 50 Identifies High-Value Male Peer to Consider for Future Companionship." I've never seen such a rare story in print;…

Goodness! The first line of a poem, that first line ending in “the old masters.” Auden, looking at a painting by Brueghel, sees a field with a plowman, a sea, and a fine ship, while, off to one side, a…