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

At times I break my own heart. In Seattle last summer, I visited Clara. We’ve been friends since second grade. She’s had a hard life and now suffers from a chronic disease that requires two or more surgeries a year. I feel so sad for her, but her spirit is strong, and I treasure our

One day, my adult son and I ascended a Swiss mountain on a gently swaying gondola that held about fifteen people. I noticed an unusual group on board, a young man, perhaps in his mid-to-late twenties, accompanied by three women, one of whom held the hand of a very well-behaved child, around kindergarten age. From

When I was twelve years old, my mother began warning me about something she called the White Slave Trade. “Don’t get caught by the White Slave Trade,” she repeated many times. She never defined it or mentioned any sexual aspect to it.  Her cautionary tone of voice sounded serious, but she always laughed at the

On a cruise from Singapore to Hong Kong, I became aware of some people’s obsession with gender roles. Among the Americans I met on the ship, I quickly made friends with a pair of travelers from Nevada: a young woman, Jo Ann, and her mother, Anni, a Buddhist nun. They were quiet, yet amiable, and