Browsing the archives for the abecedarium tag
I picked at my scrambled eggs and cantaloupe this morning as I watched her sitting at a nearby table, tapping on her phone. Last fall we’d met at another fundraiser. We were both team leaders, and she and her team were the top money-raisers. Then, as today, she looked beautiful, strong, and self-assured. She stood to [...]
Wife of Socrates. Foremother of Shakespeare’s Kate. Shrew to be tamed? Or a wonder woman whose mind was her own?
At night my mother opened a chest and took out her white silk wedding slippers. Then she daubed them a long time with ink. Early in the morning she went in those slippers to the street to line up for bread. It was ten degrees, [...]
Seth Godin brought my lizard brain to my attention, but awareness hasn’t been enough to help me ignore the fears and rages and drives of my amygdala. Last fall when I read that Jonathan Fields had a new book coming out called Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance, my lizard brain impulsively pre-ordered it. When [...]
“Violent trauma shreds the web of meaning. It destroys all the threads of relationship that link the hurt self to the world–to other people and objects, or to nature, or even to the inner world of its own feelings. The real task of a trauma victim–the task that makes life worth living again–is to reconnect [...]
I can’t stop thinking about journalist Marie Colvin, who died in Syria yesterday. You can read about her here and here and here. She risked, and gave, her life to tell the story of people who are being oppressed, people whose government attempts to hide its violence by not allowing foreign reporters access for nearly [...]
Once upon a time, there was a ten-year-old girl who lived in a house at the end of a long dirt road, and didn’t worry about things like her purpose. She wrote stories, sat at her grandfather’s executive desk on Saturday mornings, held her brush-as-microphone while imagining being interviewed by Phil Donahue, and chose for [...]
A (wonderful) former student read about Colton’s birth and emailed me, mentioning that she loved the “provenance” of his middle name, Atreyu. I inferred that she meant its “origin,” but I don’t think I’d ever used the word “provenance” myself in speaking or writing. So I looked it up. It does derive from the French [...]
Mr. Z. found some nineteenth-century documents in his late mother’s files. Most of these documents were about ownership of land. The document pictured here is from 1837, signed by President Martin Van Buren. Ownership is serious business. I “own” some “big” things–but really, don’t banks own them, and charge me a monthly fee for [...]
