Selected Essays
Memory Book
Notable essay, Best American Essays, 2010
Third place, Linda Joy Myers Memoir Prize, Soul-Making Literary Competition, National League of American PEN Women, Nob Hill, SF Bay Area branch
“I don’t know how to be nine. When people ask, I’ll still say I’m eight. I know how to act eight.”
The evening before, we’d had a small family celebration for my daughter’s ninth birthday, and she and I were walking on a dirt path in Rock Creek Park, shaded by newly leafed white oaks and red maples tall above us, the April air crisp and cool. I was curious about Lee’s comment because the previous night, wearing a long black velvet dress with her light brown hair pulled back in a bun that she’d styled herself, she had seemed nine and then some. At the head of the table, she beamed, asking people if they’d had enough to eat and, later, cutting her cake and passing around slices for everyone, making sure they received the size they wanted. “Would you like vanilla ice cream with it?” she asked. Around her neck was an antique gold locket, a bequest from her grandmother. She gave an extra large piece to her dad, Bob, because his birthday would be in three days.
“Thank you Lee,” he said. “You are so thoughtful.”
Not Knowing a Man
Grand Prize in Literature, National League of American PEN Women, 2011 Maryland State Biennial
Second place, essay category, Brainerd (MN) Writers Alliance Annual Contest, 2009
Third place, Starving Writer Quarterly Contest 2009, Milwaukie, OR
At my father’s memorial service, Mom sat on my right and my husband, Bob, was on my left. Or maybe my two-year-old daughter, Lee, was wiggling on my left. I don’t recall. But I definitely remember Mom on the right. My brother, Jeff, sat on her other side.
Our family’s many friends filled the modern wooded church, a place never attended by my dad but close to their home. Many friends had driven or flown quite a distance to be with us. Most people in the church were closer to my mom than they’d been to my father, a man who kept to himself for the most part. But they loved my dad, too, especially his college classmates and those who sang with him in the chorale. Articulate, intelligent and well-read, Dad rose to the pleasures of social occasions, laughing and talking with everyone. He enjoyed himself immensely at dinner parties or at the theatre or symphony. He and Mom gathered with friends at tailgate picnics before college football games, at art galleries and openings, and, after we had left home, traveled with one or two couples on weekend getaways.
The Office
She called it The Office so we called it The Office though anyone outside the family would have called it what it was: a closet. The 3 x 3 foot doorless alcove off a corner of the living room was most likely intended for books and maybe a record player. And we did keep the record player there along with hundreds of albums of Classical music and Broadway tunes, and dozens of books that Mom and Dad had collected over the years, their college textbooks, classic/traditional Western literature, art books and an odd assortment of paperbacks.
But Mom saw much more in the three-sided stall than a throw-away cubby under the eaves. She envisioned a place where she could be alone to do her writing: essays, journals, newspaper and magazine articles, publicity materials and newsletters, all of which she did fairly invisibly.
Close to the Wind
By late afternoon, the wind was strong enough for us to sail so we left the sweltering beach where we’d spent a couple of hours, two blistering bodies among hundreds, and drove to nearby Rehoboth Bay.
There on a small patch of sand sat our small sailboat, ready for us to add the rudder, centerboard and mast and set out on our daily sail. We’d developed a quick routine for rigging the boat, and launched fairly quickly.
Steering carefully through blue-green shallows, we reached a deeper part of the bay, shoved down the centerboard and let go. Let go of the heat, the crowds, the traffic jams during our Friday night drive. Let go of the past week’s tensions and triumphs, the relentless weekday schedules of rising early, working hard, turning in late and beginning again.
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