It’s April 6 again, a day to celebrate and to mourn. My oldest daughter Maya died on this day twenty-eight years ago. As the Covid-19 pandemic rages around the globe, millions of us find our lives radically upended; we’re scared, and we’re grieving. For those of us...
Facebook recently reminded me that my newly minted husband and I have been “friends” for seven years. It made me laugh. I think of him as my best friend – yet you couldn’t find two more opposite personalities. How on earth did this happen? No technology glitch or...
In the 22 days from my diagnosis to my surgery, cancer scared the bejesus out of me. I don’t feel especially hostile toward it. I’m more surprised than anything – and, at times even grateful for the wake-up call. On December 17 I was diagnosed with a rare form of...
My process as a writer is messy. It’s made of equal parts exhilaration and despair, moments of wanting to chuck it all, followed by renewed determination. I’ve been in a Dosi-do for the last four months as I plow through revisions of my 282-page novel interspersed...
Mass killings are happening at such an alarming rate that most of us can’t even remember when – or why – the most recent killing spree filled our Twitter feeds or our TV screens. Grieving faces, flowers and candles left on street corners, and empty rhetoric about...
“Don’t worry about anything – or anyone,” my grandmother said, and thumped her cane emphatically, underlining her words. She was speaking from the “other side,” a world where I could not hear her directly, but a gifted psychic could translate her words to me. I don’t...
“Okay, then, 2018.” Those are the words Alex Poulsen and I had engraved on our wedding bands, now stashed in a dresser drawer awaiting our marriage. Alex bought the rings on the Friday before Earth Day, and in backwards fashion proposed on April 22. When 2018 dawned,...
Maya began drinking young - she was binge drinking by the age of 15 at weekend house parties in Walnut Creek. I was a young, naive, overstretched single mom with no concept of the party culture in the wealthy suburbs of Contra Costa County where we lived in the late...
On this day 46 years ago I gave birth to a baby girl. We named her Maya. She arrived three weeks early so she was was tiny, just 5 lbs. 4 oz. For the rest of her life, Maya was in a hurry. Friends called her "Barbie" because of her white-blonde hair. She had dark...
“Write your mind!” This exhortation originated with Allen Ginsberg and came to me via one of my favorite poets Frank X Gaspar (Late Rapturous, Night of a Thousand Blossoms). Gaspar speaks of his own need for encouragement, and his realization that Ginsberg was right –...