Monthly Archives: April 2014

In Curious George Learns the Alphabet, “Z is a Zebra Zipping along with Zest.”  The best part is H.A. Rey’s illustration of the letter Z in the form of a prancing, smiling zebra (zipping with zest).  Letters coming to life … Continue reading →

The back yard at my first house was immense, with a small woods in the back.  A path through the woods led to a small stone wall I could just swing my four-year-old legs over.  The woods were dark and … Continue reading →

Words and Phrases I am Prohibited from Using Cray cray Lolz                                                                                                                                                                                                          Obvy                                                                                                                                                                                                        Hella                                                                                                                                                                                                          Yolo                                                                                                                                                                                                         Swag                                                                                                                                                                                                      Rachet                                                                                                                                                                                                   Chillax                                                                                                                                                                                                      OMG                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Crunk Cool beans If I mess up and use any of these, one or both of my daughters shakes her finger and … Continue reading →

Marriage, of course.  That’s a big change.  I have felt quite solitary for most of my life, and getting married at 36 certainly changed that.  On the other hand, my habits were quite established by then, and I married another … Continue reading →

Our favorite game was Junior Executive, a gentler version of Monopoly in which we could buy and sell products and build up our businesses, then get cut down by the arbitrariness of seasons and factory fires.  Landing on the factory … Continue reading →

We kept the TV in the basement, a big black and white with only three channels.  There was a dusty old couch and an ugly length of carpet with unfinished edges covering half the room.  It was a good place … Continue reading →

            When I was five, I lent my bedroom clock to Lyndon Johnson’s presidential campaign.  My mother was a volunteer in the Cleveland headquarters on Lee Road; she worked in the mornings while I was in kindergarten, then came home … Continue reading →

This year, I seem to have given up.  The ice is gone, the temperatures are rising, but the grass is still flat from pounds of winter snow.  Dead.  The crocuses bloomed and died under another snowfall; they lie in unpretty … Continue reading →

When an author describes a house, I almost always superimpose the description on one of the stock houses of my imagination—the house I grew up in, my grandparents’ house, or a neighbor’s house where I spent a lot of time … Continue reading →

A few weeks after the death of their first child at three months, my parents packed up a truck and drove from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. My father was about to begin his first job as a … Continue reading →