My mother’s given name was Esther. It was an honor for her at the time to have been named after her maternal grandmother but Esther is a name that fell out of popularity somewhere...
Back in the fifties my mother ranked tattoos and pierced ears in the same category. “Only gypsies have pierced ears,” she told me, totally ignoring the fact I considered that to be a positive....
A women from an Eastern European country told me when she first moved here, people would pass her and say “How’re you?” but before she had time to answer, they walked on. She didn’t...
The Outer Banks of North Carolina have been in the news a lot lately. As of this posting, ten houses have collapsed into the ocean over the past several weeks. A hurricane didn’t come...
Two weeks ago I went to Home Depot to buy a paint brush. It was a hot day. Well, hot by Seattle standards, which probably doesn’t qualify as hot to people who live outside...
Several years ago I was at the Art Institute of Chicago when there was an exhibit of work by an architectural draftsman named A.G. Rizzoli. Unrelated to his normal professional architectural work, he spent...
A couple of weeks ago my husband and I scored a couple of tickets to see Paul Simon in Seattle. He’s been a musical hero of mine since the late sixties and I was...
When I was in elementary school sometimes on a Saturday I went to a friend’s house to play. She and I had fashion dolls that were precursors to Barbie, who hadn’t been “born” yet....
Last night I watched a Netflix documentary on Ed Sullivan. The same Ed Sullivan I disliked and disparaged for taking over our living room every Sunday night when I was a kid…………….until he brought...
“You from east of the mountains?” That’s what the checkout person at Ace Hardware asked me. He was putting my phone number in their system and was taken aback by my 509 area code....
