Trying to get along with people and follow social dictates – or not – has given me some funny memories. It’s hard to forget meeting Clive, my posh sister-in-law Elaine’s new boyfriend. She prepared us ahead of time by saying he was very spiritual, a trait she apparently admired. When he arrived in our home, […]
“We’re all nurse logs for each other” is a phrase I saw on a t-shirt recently in Seattle, Washington. Locals understood what this meant. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest in a family of campers and hikers. Nurse logs were common in these forests: fallen trees that, over time, welcomed seedlings that sprouted in,
I’m not always clever enough to comprehend hidden agendas. But a recent incident whacked me over the head. My adult son lived in a different city, and I loved visiting him. He often took me out with his friends for coffee, drinks, or a party. I enjoyed hanging out with his social group; this didn’t
Jane and Joe, who lived in Los Angeles, loved to throw a big Halloween party every year. Although I’d moved away, I found myself back in the City of Angels on Halloween and they insisted I come. Then I remembered Lowell, a college buddy of Joe’s. “Oh dear, I really don’t want to see Lowell.
I never imagined my cousin, Lucy, would become a ghost. To my mind, ghosts were troubled souls, but Lucy cast a lively yet gentle light with her ukulele always at hand, ready to strike up a song. In my precarious childhood, Lucy and her husband, Kenji, were my legal guardians, my safety net. They gave
As I entered the radiation room at Queens Hospital for the first time, I shivered. More than a dozen people waited for their cancer tumors to get zapped. Reluctantly, I joined their ranks. I felt shy and scared. Once I sat down and I glanced around, it amazed me to see the wide variety of
For over seven hours on an airline flight, I felt skinny and small. It was such a novel sensation, I almost giggled with delight throughout the trip. At 5 feet 8 inches tall, I have maintained a normal weight which, over the decades, varied from the heavy to the light end of that range. In
When a face peered in from outside my 28th floor condo window, my stomach leaped up to my throat. To my horror, the head, unattached, floated up, beyond my sight. I had entered a Stephen King world. After a moment, I realized that the “head” might have been a crinkled piece of brown paper, about
According to my mother, I grew up in a haunted house. She located the ghost, specifically, in the attic. One hundred years old, our home looked like a roomy old farmhouse and stood in a semi-rural suburb of Seattle. The upstairs area had two bedrooms, one bath and a cozy den, unfinished with bare beams.
It’s always intriguing to notice when people exist together in the same moment, but have polar opposite experiences. This reminds me of the man who hated taillights. When I attended a meditation retreat on the Big Island of Hawaii, we took a field trip to the erupting volcano, Kilauea. Carpooling meant I found myself in
