On the kitchen counter next to the blender is the chicken bowl. Not of chicken but for chicken. It’s where I put the strawberry hulls, the apple cores and the leftover bits of kale and lettuce – the things that would otherwise end up in the garbage disposal or, if I were really that ...
The winter I was a graduate student at Northwestern University in 1982, my right eyelid twitched. It twitched during classes and it twitched in the evenings when I studied. On weekends, when I would occasionally go out to local Evanston pubs with my fellow students, my eye would twitch so ...
While cleaning out my car this week, I found a relic. It’s a COVID mask, navy blue with gold Rudolfs on it, purchased the first Christmas of the pandemic. It was one of 10 I bought along the way. I don’t know where the others are, but this one survived. It was four years ago ...
“Wouldn’t hurt,” the handsome young doctor said. He was responding to my question about whether sleeping on my back might help my back pain. “Wouldn’t hurt and might help,” he said. And so began my effort to train myself for back sleeping, a shift in habit akin to ...
Most mornings around 10, the phone rings. It’s my daughter, calling from upstate New York, where she shares a home with her husband. The calls go on for at least a half-hour, an unusually long time for someone who has always avoided talking on the phone. The aversion to phone ...
The word was “jilt” and had I gotten my turn on the Scrabble board, it would have been worth more than 40 points. I’d been hanging onto that J tile since we first started the game, left it lurking there on my rack through several dud turns, awaiting the right opportunity to land my word ...
