All I Want

When you were young, did you ever scour the Sears, JC Penney or other Christmas catalogs, dog-earing pages, circling wishes, and telling your parents, “All I want for Christmas is…” followed by a long prioritized list? Ah, I was that greedy child but at least knew...

Freedom and Goldenrod

A month ago, I wrote about atonement, asking my daughter Jessica to go for a walk and making amends. That conversation, rescheduled due to Jessica’s sick cat and other obligations, happened this past weekend. In between, on her recommendation, I read my daughter’s...

Restlessness

Completing a months-long project, meeting a difficult goal, walking out of a final exam, filing a major brief, an institution-wide evaluation or a huge end-of-the-year report, and you feel elated, yahoo, relieved, whew, right? Not me, unless you include tired,...

Atonement

When I lived in Baltimore, my neighborhood book club read Ian McEwan’s Atonement. A few years later, I saw the movie. Ah, if only I could write with McEwan’s fine precision and capture the film’s brilliant cinematographic scenes. But there was a problem: I hated the...