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The red-haired giant from Tennessee was showing me his gowns, trailing his fingers in a reverie along the satin and feathers that hung in his closet. “This is my favorite,” he gushed, pulling out the hem of a silky blue number. A photo of him wearing that dress and ten pounds of wig and makeup sat on his bedside table. His slow accent, his friendliness, and his interest in what I thought was quite touching.

It was Christmas break 1969, and I was visiting my boyfriend’s gay friend Richard in San Francisco. We’d hitchhiked for two days from our apartment in Isla Vista a few months after rioters had burned down the Bank of America. I remember wandering over to the bank several days later with my dad’s check to deposit, then looking up in shock when I realized that it was my bank that had burned down. Reality on the news doesn’t always immediately translate into your reality. (more…)

It’s such a simple thing, a staircase. Yet I spent a good half hour with a two-year-old recently using the library stairs as a giant fascinating toy. Up, down, jump, fall, hold onto my hand, DON’T hold onto my hand, go up, turn around, step back down, do it again, repeat.

Fischer-Price doesn’t make stairs, and Toys R Us didn’t get a dime from our play that day. No toy company in China benefited financially from Ben’s delight in this old school exercise, yet he delighted in every risky step. Adults passed up going up and going down, barely registering the extreme concentration Ben was marshaling for his feet and legs to work together. (more…)

Halene and I were eating lunch together, together for the last time as it turned out. “So, you remember that scene in Titanic where Jack sketches Rose lying nude on a couch?” Yes, I said. “Well, that was Dogie and me.” She was looking down at her salad and remembering her cowboy-painter husband who had died recently of Parkinson’s. She looked up at me. “We did a lot of that.”

I was a beginning teacher in 1976 when Halene came into my life. I’d had all my training and educational foundation classes, but was just eager not very disciplined, energetic but not methodical, passionate but not really sure of my teaching theory. Through the years that I was privileged to orbit Halene’s great star, I developed my own beliefs in the power of children’s learning abilities, with or without teachers. Her grounding helped me stay strong through the nine years that I homeschooled my sons. Her examples and wisdom guide my teaching life still. (more…)

I often tell new mothers about the “many weanings” a woman goes through and that weaning a child from breastfeeding is just one of many. Now I’m going through another weaning myself: as of this week, all my children will be living on their own.

My oldest son lives back east with two roommates in a rental house. My youngest son is moving into a rental house with three friends. My middle son is moving to a house his girlfriend bought. They’ll be fixing up, painting, installing, redecorating, and clearing the land for many months. I may bring over a KFC bucket and a bottle of wine once in a while, and they may even deign to come over to my house for an actual home-cooked Sunday dinner, but things will never be quite the same. The intense living-together time, where people get up in the morning and sit at a kitchen table together, the time when people sleepily wish each other good night and then good morning again: that time has passed for me. (more…)

Sometimes I think my whole adult life I’ve been searching for the eight-year-old me. The eight-year-old who was so confident, creative, and sure back in 1956. That little girl who wrote stories about collies and Army men and nuclear war, who made up plays with her marionettes, held circuses in her backyard, directed plays, and painted the paint-by-numbers sets sent by grandparents.

I wanted to be an archaeologist and live outside Cairo, dig up ancient tombs, and carefully brush sand off of mosaics and painted sarcophagi. I remember sitting in Principal Virginia Gerling’s office and paging through a huge book on excavating Egyptian artifacts. I wanted to sit under a canopy swathed in white cotton in the Valley of the Kings with my whisk broom, paint brush, and dental tools picking at dirt surrounding golden statues. Where’d that little girl go? (more…)

My dad was a brilliant suburban Cleveland kid, a loner, and an only child till his little brother came along when he was 12. Starting his teenage years with a little tag-along brother couldn’t have been easy. He wasn’t brilliant in school academics, though, telling my brothers and me that his teacher separated the class into the Flowers and the Weeds, and that he always sat in the Weed Row.

He met my mother in the high school band: she played clarinet and he played trumpet. Dad courted her by blasting trumpet fanfares in the elementary school playing field across the street from her house. Their first date was on a band trip in Elkhart, Indiana, where they went to a movie together while the band was doing I don’t know what. The band trip chaperons perhaps didn’t even know they’d gone missing. I never asked which movie they’d gone to see. (more…)

I finished my 60th birthday present of spending 60 days in Paris: one day each for 60 years lived. I’ve tabulated below my activities, whereabouts, and visits for those 60 days.

Tuileries Garden: many walk-throughs

Notre-Dame Cathedral: many walk-bys and visits; walking up the stairs for view from the top: 1 time

Louvre: 4 visits

Musee d’Orsay: 3 visits

Pompidou Center’s museum of modern art: 3 visits

Basilica of Sacre Couer Church in Montmartre: 3 visits

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I’ve listed below my top ten reasons to travel to Paris. Maybe you’ll be able only to visit a day or two, or stay for a week, or maybe you’ll be able to move your household to the Left Bank. In my modest 60 days here, these are the reasons I think make sense for making the effort to visit this spectacular (the Eiffel Tower!) and difficult (this is the third day of a transporation strike and I’m not sure how I’ll get to the airport on Sunday) French capital. 

10. Paris is part of your literary culture. You’ve read literature based in Paris or you’ve seen plays and movies based on French books. From Honore Balzac to Victor Hugo to Jules Verne to Marcel Proust, Paris holds much of your impressions of the world of words. I saw Victor Hugo’s home today on La Place des Vosges. I saw Marcel Proust’s bedroom reassembled in the Musee Carnavalet yesterday. And I’ve seen Auguste Rodin’s plaster and bronze images of Honore Balzac at the Rodin Museum. This is the real deal.

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It was supposed to be foggy and cloudy, but it was sunny. We were supposed to be tired, but we were energized. There was a transportation strike, but we were walking. These factors all made a perfect combination for a trek up la butte of Montmartre. I hadn’t realized we were walking up to the Montmartre’s old gypsum mines.

Walking straight north from the apartment, my friend and made our way to the old village of Montmartre, originally a Roman temple, then a Benedictine monastery. Montmartre is still the highest point (at 420 feet) in Paris and is topped by the Basilica of Sacre Couer (pictured below). Montmartre was its own village, separated from Paris by a wall, until 1860 when it was incorporated into the city.

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