Category Archives: Aging, well enough

Saying yes, with realism and in style.

If you were not the rain…

“If you were not the rain, my love, then be the tree Saturated and bountiful, be the tree. And if you were not the tree, my love, then be the stone Saturated and moist,  be the stone. And if you … Continue reading

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Awesome Plitvice, Croatia

“Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints, and use nothing but time.” These are the directives posted by UNESCO at the entrance to the trails and waterfalls that make up the Plitvice Lake Park in northern Croatia. The Park … Continue reading

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Autumn at Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge

Yes, there are the small, quaint towns of Vermont, the daunting heights of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, but there are also beautiful spots of color and energy here in our city, in its downtown and its suburbs.  Mount Auburn Cemetery … Continue reading

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“Nebraska” — a love-letter to the American heartland

Alexander Payne’s Nebraska is a love-letter to his native state, to a dying way of life, to characters both flawed and uncomfortably familiar, and to a landscape so desolate as to send shivers down your spine.  It is all these … Continue reading

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Mothers’ Day for all seasons…

At my local grocery this morning, the flower scene was in full bloom, so to speak. Flowers everywhere–tossed on the check out counter, held by shoppers, pinned on chests.   So many flowers, in fact, that if I don’t see … Continue reading

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Tips on Happiness I: what to throw out, what to keep

Tips on Happiness: A Rant and a Celebration in Several Parts I was waiting for the journal prescription–keep a journal, they all say it–and it came in Dr. Andrew Weil’s third tip for achieving happiness.  (It’s on MSNBC, under “Happiness … Continue reading

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First loves: Notes on Peter Brook’s “The Grand Inquisitor”

Dear Y., …and so it was that on a rainy Boston evening, we skipped together to the Paramount Theater, battling the puddles and the light snow, to see Peter Brook’s “The Grand Inquisitor.” We were full with food and wine … Continue reading

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Secret threads…

~~When Araxi Astardjian Oshagan, my maternal grandmother, announced in that gentle but patrician voice of hers, that she was going to start learning English, it seemed an improbable project.  Our grandmother, the quintessential example of a woman who was growing … Continue reading

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Rx for the two of us…

For my mother, Anahid, who died on November 4, 2005 in Amman, Jordan–these words, written in her rebellious, intelligent, quirky spirit. Fragment from my mother’s scarabé embroidery Here’s the scene. You’re gathered around a festive dining table. There’s a marvelous … Continue reading

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Reading Elizabeth Bishop after the click…

  In Elizabeth Bishop’s gem of a poem, One Art, the refrain that knits the entire poem together is so simple as to fall below the radar screen: The art of losing is hard to master/It is not a disaster, … Continue reading

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