And do they wake up to smiling faces and a bowl of oatmeal with blueberries and sliced bananas and crushed almonds and walnuts?  Or do they cuddle up with the cockroaches deep in the walls?  Do they know who Laurie Colwin was and why she’s still my favorite author, or do they squirm around without books in lonely ditches? I know what certain spammers were up to when they should have been sleeping.  They bombarded one of my posts with almost 2000 brainless ads. So I finally decided to surrender my tribute, “Spring Forward,” all about Spring and Maestro Sixten Ehrling (once a...

   It’s Our Stories That Keep Us Young… The other day, Kiki told me it was just fine if  I pulled up a chair at her table and ate my sandwich with her.  We smiled — that instant dialect that even babies know — and that’s when she told me what she does. And how old she was. “I’m a people watcher,” she informed me with delight. I felt at home right away.  My mother taught me this art at an early age, while my father parked the car and we waited out front. “Are you noticing your favorite spring colors?” I asked, wishing immediately that...

I was a bit shocked after reading that Meg Wolitzer told a New York Times reporter about her precious Sundays writing fiction in the New York Society Library.  Back when I lived in the city, the library was a carefully guarded oasis.  It’s where I wrote my best shipping stories for Brandon’s — $75. a year to secure both serenity and delicious company.  And it was something you kept to yourself — in those pre-FB days when you didn’t tell! Privacy issues aside, I’m really glad that the “don’t tell’ policy is enthusiastically disregarded in the...

It was the goo at the end that clearly summed up the sentiment.  The part right before the goo was just a polite way of getting there.  This foreign-sounding phrase (possibly a Bhutan dialect or some other land where goo is all that was left after everything else is gone) was exactly what the doctor ordered when it was very important to be at least a little diplomatic… to shield a harsher opinion.  It was uttered when folks wanted to sound open-minded about something we knew they really didn’t care for at all.  A seemingly non-committal way of showing disdain without the messy...

Everyone knows all about the shoemaker’s son — but what about the photographer’s daughter?  When I was growing up, everyone in our family helped my father shake trays in our kitchen darkroom.  And when I became a Brownie, my father gave me the official Brownie version of the popular Brownie camera…  And then when I moved into my teens, I was given a 1945 Mercury.  The first camera  with a slick 1/1000 shutter speed.  I still have a photo of a baboon that I shot with my precious camera and brought to life under my father’s watchful eye.  My father had his Leicas and...

I haven’t mentioned how much fun I’m having volunteering as the publicity consultant for Aloha Community Library.  How our local 20 foot tall icon, Harvey the Giant Rabbit, will soon be getting his own super-sized Aloha library card for everyone to see.  And how I’m helping to launch a new speaker series so that the library can step forward as a lively meeting place for all of Aloha. It takes a variety of steps in the right direction to get things going  — But That’s Not What Happened today when I set out to join the Aloha Business Association, planning to meet with the...