I don’t know if I ever would’ve gotten a tattoo if my daughter hadn’t made us appointments with her favorite artist. I agreed to do it, but didn’t know what to choose. I went back and forth between some ideas (Hawaiian sunset! Lavender roses!), but finally decided on a bluebird of happiness. At the time,…
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I don’t know if I ever would’ve gotten a tattoo if my daughter hadn’t made us appointments with her favorite artist. I agreed to do it, but didn’t know what to choose. I went back and forth between some ideas (Hawaiian sunset! Lavender roses!), but finally decided on a bluebird of happiness. At the time,…
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Last year I learned that the DMV will suspend your license if you receive a diagnosis of dementia. You get a letter and are offered the chance to appeal their decision. Doctors are required by law to notify the DMV once the diagnosis is made, and so the letter may come as a surprise, depending…
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WHERE I’M FROM inspired by a poem by George Ella Lyon I am from the old country: Belarus, Poland, running from the Cossacks The Lady with the Lamp: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free I am from Far Rockaway, NY; St. Louis, Detroit I am from dill pickles,…
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…and they want their stuff back! Oh, the clunkyness of it all. This photo is easily worth one thousand words, but instead: my favorite screen saver: On Mighty Toaster Wings!
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No matter where I am–at home or abroad–people ask me for directions. I don’t know why. Most of the time I can answer correctly, but I’m sure I’ve made some mistakes. Years ago, I brought this up at lunch with my friends and colleagues at the high school where I worked. One of the (younger)…
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My favorite fairy tale? Hands down, it’s “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” Why? The princesses would dress up every night and disappear though a secret tunnel to dance the night away with handsome princes. They would return the next morning, their shoes worn out from dancing. I loved that story, partly because of the new shoes…
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My story begins at the end of a harrowing week, the week my 81 year old father died. His kind heart, the one he always wore on his sleeve, finally gave out. He had warned me in so many words: you never have as much time as you think you do. He died on a…
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My name is Risa. That’s R-I-S-A. When I was growing up, I was the only Risa I had ever heard of. Surrounded by a gaggle of girls named Karen, Kathy, Linda, Carol, Nancy, and Diane, I was one of a kind. I got used to fielding the comments and questions: No, it’s not short for…
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This is what I read at my Dad’s funeral in 2001. It sums up many of the life lessons I learned from him. My dad was a teacher, and like many outstanding teachers, he never took time off from teaching. Sure, there were vacations and summers, but he was always on the job. If no…
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Billy Joel’s recording of “Just the Way You Are” was released (or “dropped” as we say now) in September of 1977. By early 1978, the song was still getting a lot of airplay on the radio. During the nearly four months my daughter was in the Intensive Care Nursery at UCSF, my husband and I …
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The first time I saw snow was the year my family lived in Manhattan. My sister and I attended elementary school across the street from our building. We’d bundle up in our new winter coats, pants, mittens, and boots. Just one winter: getting used to the smell of wet things drying on the radiator, taking…
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This prompt gave me the opportunity to write about my pediatrician, Dr.Elizabeth Torrey Andrews. In a weird coincidence, I googled her and discovered an obituary in the Reed College magazine, the college my younger son graduated from. Dr. Andrews was only a Reedie for one year (1923), then transferred to the University of Oregon, following…
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As kids, we started thinking about the next Halloween on November first. Over the next several months, ideas were floated, refined, discarded, and resurrected. These were the most important decisions a kid could make in those days. As a parent, I had to wait patiently while my kids repeated this cycle of indecision, hoping that…
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The Indoor Noisy Book by Margaret Wise Brown was written in 1942. I received a hardcover copy of it in the 1950s. This book, a colorfully illustrated story of the little dog Muffin who has a cold and must stay inside to rest, was a gift from my across-the-street neighbor John. John was a bit…
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“You can’t do that to another girl!” Alex was really pissed. I didn’t understand why she was pissed at me, exactly. It had been her boyfriend’s idea to walk in the summer moonlight and make out in some neighbor’s yard, not mine. It would have remained a regrettable secret, but Alex (not her real…
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Who was Harold Mendelson? He’s a guy who grew up in the Fillmore District of San Francisco and went on to become a famous actor and game show host. He was also a lifelong buddy of my father’s. You never heard of Harold? But does the name Hal March ring a bell? Even though he…
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When I got pregnant with my daughter, I worked at the law school on the UC Berkeley campus, known then as Boalt Hall. I described my position there as “petty bureaucrat,” doing payroll and other administrative duties. It so happened that nine women on the staff became pregnant that year. Rumors circulated among staff that…
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(From a blog post I wrote on August 6, 2013, when Google Glass was on the verge of becoming a thing*) I felt inspired to write something about an exhibit I saw at the very wonderful Oakland Museum of California recently. In a little, low tech mock-up garage within the California History gallery, I discovered…
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My husband’s aunt was getting married at a fancy country club, and we were all invited. We decided to take the two older kids and leave the toddler at home with my sister. They got new clothes for the occasion and were drilled over and over about proper table manners for the luncheon that followed…
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“Do you think my hair is falling out?” my sister asked. After going through a round of chemotherapy for lung cancer, hair loss would not be unexpected. She raked her fingers through her hair as she asked, and we both noticed the silver strands she now held in her hand. After a moment, I asked…
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Last year, the year of lockdown and confinement, I was finally able to achieve a longtime goal: to walk the entire Camino de Santiago–a journey of about 480 miles. And then I decided to climb Mt. Fuji, a short hop of only 46 miles. I am currently traversing the Southern Island of New Zealand, on…
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First, to set the scene: My dad and I are sitting on the couch on a Friday night (a Friday night that we don’t go to the synagogue for Shabbat services), and it’s time for the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports’ Friday Night Fights on TV. My dad, first in his family to go to college…
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My mother started making hats right around the time I became a teenager. This was not coincidental, I believe. It was a good time for her to find something to do. Not the happiest of stay-at-home mothers in the 1960s, she desperately needed an outlet. First she helped form a singing group of PTA mothers.…
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I imagine the smoke-filled room: a group of fat cats sit around a table. Their shirt sleeves are rolled up, they puff on stumpy cigars, their foreheads are slick with sweat. It’s getting late; the hours tick by while the discussion gets heated. Voices get louder and the shouted comments are laced with profanity. Fists…
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Little Rock, Arkansas is the home of Central High, the Clinton Library—and the only dedicated purse museum in the United States. Although not a traditional art museum, I think the ESSE Purse Museum exhibits a different kind of art: symbols of the lives of women in a one-of-a-kind collection of clutches, crossovers, and cavernous carryalls.…
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Let me just clarify at the outset: I have been stress knitting for months now, ever since this lockdown, shelter-in-place, doomscrolling life we are living began. I need something to look at so my eyes don’t cross (or close) while I’m knitting away. I say this because I have binge watched a staggering amount of…
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December 14th, 1997. One of the longest droughts in California history ended the night my daughter was born. The rain started sometime in the afternoon. I couldn’t tell you when, exactly. We were waiting to find out what was wrong with her and why she had failed her first test: the Apgar. One of the…
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In the Spring of 2016, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by one of my favorite teachers at Saint Mary’s College– Alex Green. Although I was a little bit nervous, Alex is such a great interviewer that I got comfortable onstage with him immediately. We were there to talk about my recently published memoir,…
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As the story goes, the property on Valencia Street was zoned for retail. But the new tenants wanted to open a tutoring center. Naturally, the solution was to start stocking up on pirate stuff. The Pirate Supply Store at 826 Valencia is really a front for a place where kids in San Francisco can get…
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And the winner is: My aunt Ruth! I’ve written about my Aunt Ruth and her buttons here and in my book. She inspired me to start my own collection when I was a teenager. I kept them in a small box inside my grandparents’ secretary desk. On more than one occasion, I talked to my…
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Well, since this is a prompt about shoes, I figured that a pair of stories would be fitting. The first one is an excerpt from my book. The Red Shoes They were fire-engine red. Cherries in the snow red, million-dollar red; movie star pouty lips, just like on Mad Men red—an I-mean-business red. They had…
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” I want lots of roses,” my sister said. This was the first time she directly spoke about the inevitability of her death, acknowledging that some kind of farewell or celebration would be held for her. And she had a few ideas. I grabbed a note pad and we started planning what would become a…
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What does plowing a field have to do with knitting, one may ask. The answer: As knitters know, when knitting an intarsia pattern one reads the pattern from right to left, and in the following row from left to right. This type of writing/notation is known as boustrophedon. The word originates from the Greek: as…
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The Pink Dress None of this was supposed to happen: not finding the dress, not losing the dress, and certainly not finding it again. But that’s what did happen. In the days before you could make online reservations, my husband used the services of a trusted travel agent for his business trips and some…
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“What in the world will we do with all this stuff?” Soon after our mother passed away, my sister and I were faced with the daunting task that so many of our generation are dealing with these days: sorting through a lifetime’s accumulation of clothes, jewelry, tchotchkes, and mementos. Drawer after drawer revealed scarves, purses,…
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I wrote a series of letters to my mother around Mother’s Day, ten years after her death: my attempt to get to a place of forgiveness. Dear Mom, I guess we were a mismatch from the beginning. You wanted a boy; you got me: a scabby-kneed tree-climber, a girl who played with mud and tar…
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This piece originally appeared in 2018 for the Student Activism prompt. Now in 2020, once again young activists are taking a leading role in the Black Lives Matter movement, taking it to the streets and the seats of government as a beleaguered nation is forced to face its history of systemic racism while a devastating…
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At dinner time, dads cup their hands around their mouths and call their kids home.
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"It was bashert," she used to say, using the Yiddish word for destiny
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The photographs in LIFE captured powerful moments, whether the subjects were soldiers, politicians, athletes, poets and writers, Hollywood stars, or everyday people.
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It was more than just a cake; it was an architectural marvel.
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There I am, waiting for my shampoo to begin, when my sister emerges from behind the curtain at the back of the salon.
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He was my first crush. Cubby O’Brian played the drums on The Mickey Mouse Club. Much to my dismay, he was always paired up with Karen*, who had pretty blonde curls. I didn’t look anything like this: Not me. No way. When I saw an article in the SF Chronicle about the Disney Family Museum,…
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Or, more accurately: Time captured in a batch of letters. After my mother passed away in 2007, my sister and I found a stash of letters tucked away in my mom’s old cedar hope chest, along with some of what we assumed was her honeymoon lingerie. What a find! I’d forgotten about the letters, but…
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While I enjoyed talking about eight days of presents, what I didn't talk about was how many of my gifts were practical things, like, oh, socks, for example.
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Once we were six, and now we are five. First cousins. We lined up like this: my sister, the oldest; the only boy; two of us born a few months apart; the middle of three sisters; and the baby. We posed for pictures together from the time we were toddlers. In the beginning, there were…
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When I was an adult, I found a little blue booklet with a few pages of notes written by my mother. She had filled in my name, my date of birth, weight, doctor's name, and a list of which shots I was given and when, with a reference to how much and what kind of formula I was fed. End of story.
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Those eyes, the black turtlenecks, the bon mots and literary references...Ilya was smart and sexy and mysterious.
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The Children's Room became my domain. This is where I first started reading about Beezus and Ramona, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, Amelia Earhart, Emma Lazarus,The All-of-a-Kind Family, Charlotte, Nancy Drew, and the magic stories of Edward Eager.
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Throughout my childhood, Grampa Mike was always there : birthdays, holidays, ordinary days...and he used to show up with a flat of eggs and maybe some roses that were a little past their prime.
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Honestly, if I didn’t skirt around the truth when I was a teenager I never would’ve had any fun. Was I dishonest? On occasion, yes. And on one occasion I got out of a jam by being honest after I got myself into said jam by cheating. Let me explain. For some reason I no…
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September 2, 1973 We began our honeymoon with an afterparty at a nearby restaurant. Several of our friends came along from the wedding; we shared some additional toasts at the bar before my brand-new husband and I drove to the airport to begin our long weekend away. Times being what they were, what with my…
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I’m sure we thought we were terribly grown up, going on a date and all. Did my mother make me wear gloves? She may have.
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"Notably the Berkeley School of Criminology was targeted by key players in the US military-industrial complex such as Ronald Reagan himself, then Governor of California and Regent of UC-Berkeley."
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Before I can start talking about PE, I need to explain a couple of things. When I was in elementary school (fifth grade, I think), I came down with pneumonia. I believe I missed an entire month of school. The teacher had all the kids in my class send me get well cards, which I…
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I eat my peas with honey,
I've done it all my life.
It makes the peas taste funny,
But it keeps them on my knife. --Gelett Burgess
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Back before FOMO was a thing, it never dawned on me to do anything on “spring break.” Now, what do we think about when we think about spring break anyway? Off to the beach or the slopes, depending–right? College or high school kids up to no good, shenanigans and high jinks that these days are…
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I couldn’t wait to move out of my parents’ house after high school. I had decided to take what is now referred to as a “gap year,” and got no end of flak from my parents about it. I went searching for a job so I could make the first and last months’ rent for…
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The skin on my grandmother’s hands was paper thin. It’s what I remember most about her. She also had piercing brown eyes and a way of clamping her lips together that signaled her disapproval. She wasn’t a warm and affectionate sort of grandmother. Not at all. She was more of a “my way or the…
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He bought us ice cream and pretended to scold us when we stuck out our tongues to lick our cones. When we sat next to him with food on our plates, he'd look surprised and point at something behind us. We'd turn around to look, and he'd have taken a bite of our sandwich. His big blue eyes gave nothing away--he was innocent!
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I found myself sitting next to women my age, or not much older, who were military wives. They came from the Midwest, the South and back East.....Their husbands were off fighting in Vietnam while these young wives held down a job, kept house, took care of the car, called the refrigerator repairman, paid the bills, and tried to stay sane.
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I began wearing an anklet when I'd outgrown little girl ankle socks and graduated to cheap mesh stockings in shades of a summer tan, worn over smooth legs. I went to Woolworths and used my allowance to buy my first anklet. My sister and I both wore them, copying one of our beloved aunts who wore a fancy one that had a tiny flower with a pearl in its center, with her name engraved on it.
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Parents, we’ve all had these moments, right? Right?? One day my daughter invited a friend from school over to play. I’ll call this friend Jane, because that is her name. Jane was eight or nine–a year older than my daughter–and since her mom and I were friends, the girls had spent time together before, sometimes…
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Oh, it was so great at the beginning. My husband brought home the machine from his office and we went off the the video rental store and wandered the aisles like kids in a candy store. On a weekend, after the kids went to bed, we’d watch movies back to back, remembering to “be kind…
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We were looking at a ridiculously expensive cut of meat that we were instructed to stud with truffles, brush with brandy, brown in butter, slather with a mixture of more butter blended with pâté, and finally wrap like a precious gem in a buttery dough.
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While gaggles of kids talked and laughed at lunch, I found a quiet corner and savored my solitude as I ate my sandwich alone. Thanks to a thoughtful custodian who unlocked a room for me, I could avoid being seen; I spent my period of exile in silent, and sometimes salty, contemplation.
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This isn’t about my fame or lack of it. This is about secondhand fame. To be precise, this is about my father’s famous friend: Carol Channing. My dad grew up in San Francisco, and as a precursor to his eventual career as a drama teacher, he got involved in theater during his high school years.…
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Excerpted from my memoir, There Was a Fire Here. October 20, 1991. Oakland, California — There was a fire here. It started high above our house, on a hill facing west. No one knows for certain how it started, but a human hand set something burning and started The Fire. The fire incinerated, it eliminated; it…
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1968. High school. Last half of junior year, first half of senior year. Waiting for my life to start for real. Yearning to move on. Falling in love, falling in lust, making some bad choices and a couple of good ones, trying new things, boys on my mind, unhappy at home, hard truths, assassinations, end…
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This must be the way things are done here, I thought. No turning back now. So I focused on the ceiling fan as it spun in a lazy circle, thinking about how I would describe this feeling to my friends.
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I was never really satisfied, but basically gave up on achieving the ideal arch I'd been searching for most of my life. I mean, while doing other things and actually HAVING a life.
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I woke up that morning thinking: today I will glow. I always heard that brides get this special glow you can’t fake or create with makeup, it just happens the day you get married, so I checked the mirror expecting to find it, except it wasn’t there yet, and I thought, well, maybe it creeps…
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Wesley was an important figure to me at a time when I felt excited, scared, adventurous, and doubtful. He read my words, praised me, and called me out. I felt appreciated and challenged by him.
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My sister checks in with the woman behind the counter, signing her name and mentioning what she’s there for. It hardly seems necessary to mention this. Everyone who enters this room, unless they are a support person like me, is here for one reason: they have cancer.
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My journey to meet Madeleine began with a phone call. I was in the midst of cleaning out my late mother’s kitchen, standing in front of her pantry looking at boxes and cans dating back to the 20th century, when my son-in-law reached me on my cell phone. “I guess you know why I’m calling,”…
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One of my favorite things to do when I was a kid: Grab a book and climb a tree and read until someone came looking for me.
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As I’ve been following the young activists today who are taking a leadership role in a fight my generation seemed to have given up on, it brought me back to another time when young people felt both helpless and passionate about a cause. In our day, it was the anti-war movement. What is tragically similar…
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Her name is Rockie, but don’t take her for granite. One of her jokes. Her given name is Rokama. According to several sources I consulted, in Hebrew the name means “comforted.” Or beloved. Or one who has received mercy. Or possibly: compassion. They all fit. If I had to name some of the influential women…
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Aunt Ruth used to chide me when I complained about being exhausted after chasing my young children around. “In my day,” she said, “we’d put the kids to bed—and then figure out how to save the world!” Saving the world meant throwing herself into the fray: she’d hoist a sign, march and demonstrate in the…
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My journey to meet Madeleine began with a phone call. I was in the midst of cleaning out my late mother’s kitchen, standing in front of her pantry looking at boxes and cans dating back to the 20th century, when my son-in-law reached me on my cell phone. “I guess you know why I’m calling,”…
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In 1971, I was living in Berkeley, California. I attended classes on campus and also worked there as I put myself through school at UC Berkeley. I lived in a house with three roommates, a large tank of tropical fish, my two cats, and an Old English sheepdog. My boyfriend spent his freshman year away,…
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I first read the book when I was a teenager. It’s the only book I missed two meals to finish. I staggered out of my bedroom late in the afternoon after turning the last page. I’d been lost for what seemed like days in the lives of Scarlett, Ashley, Melanie and Rhett. My parents must…
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This is how it started. I asked him to write down the lyrics to “Both Sides Now” for me. We were both seniors in high school, hanging out in the same circle of hippie wannabe ne’er do-wells. The song was on the radio all the time and I wanted to learn the words. I knew…
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The last time I saw Kelly, he’d been dead for over a year. In yet another dream, he was sitting next to me on a bus. “You have to let me go,” he said. When I met him, in 1966, Kelly was a junior in high school. He was outrageous, audacious, charismatic, and sexy as…
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Family legend has it that my dad fully expected me, his second daughter, to be a son. I imagine him pacing in the waiting room in the maternity ward, punching his fist in a glove, thinking about the times he’d play catch in the backyard and discuss the finer points of the game with a…
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The year: 1957-1958. I was six and my sister was eight when our parents told these two San Francisco-born California girls that we were packing up and moving to New York City. My father had entered the doctoral program at Teachers College, Columbia University, and we’d be living in Morningside Heights for a year—giving up…
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Thanks to a program that no longer exists, I was able to attend the local college while still a senior in high school. After filling out the necessary paperwork and expressing my urgent need to study Italian—a class not offered at my school—I was approved to begin classes on campus in the fall of 1968.…
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When my husband and I bought our first house after years of being renters, we were excited but a little bit terrified. The night before we made our offer, neither one of us got any sleep. We had looked and looked, and then one day the mother of one of our daughter’s kindergarten classmates told…
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The Beatles break-up began in 1969, the year I graduated from high school. I wished it weren’t so, but it was inevitable that they would go their separate ways, just as it was inevitable that high school would end, and everything would change.
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Caitlin, my daughter, spent several months in the Intensive Care Nursery as an infant. She needed open heart surgery and ended up spending several months recovering, having setbacks, and recovering, before she was finally able to come home at around four months of age. The ICN was full of babies who were too small or…
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Tattoo You
Prompted By Tattoos and Piercings
/ Stories
I don’t know if I ever would’ve gotten a tattoo if my daughter hadn’t made us appointments with her favorite artist. I agreed to do it, but didn’t know what to choose. I went back and forth between some ideas (Hawaiian sunset! Lavender roses!), but finally decided on a bluebird of happiness. At the time,…
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When the Right Thing is the Hardest Thing or: He Had a Fast Car
Prompted By The DMV
/ Stories
Last year I learned that the DMV will suspend your license if you receive a diagnosis of dementia. You get a letter and are offered the chance to appeal their decision. Doctors are required by law to notify the DMV once the diagnosis is made, and so the letter may come as a surprise, depending…
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Where I’m From
Prompted By Is Where I’m From Who I Am?
/ Stories
WHERE I’M FROM inspired by a poem by George Ella Lyon I am from the old country: Belarus, Poland, running from the Cossacks The Lady with the Lamp: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free I am from Far Rockaway, NY; St. Louis, Detroit I am from dill pickles,…
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The ’80s Called…
Prompted By My First Computer
/ Stories
…and they want their stuff back! Oh, the clunkyness of it all. This photo is easily worth one thousand words, but instead: my favorite screen saver: On Mighty Toaster Wings!
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Ms Information
Prompted By Directionally Challenged
/ Stories
No matter where I am–at home or abroad–people ask me for directions. I don’t know why. Most of the time I can answer correctly, but I’m sure I’ve made some mistakes. Years ago, I brought this up at lunch with my friends and colleagues at the high school where I worked. One of the (younger)…
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They Could’ve Danced All Night
Prompted By Favorite Fairy Tale
/ Stories
My favorite fairy tale? Hands down, it’s “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” Why? The princesses would dress up every night and disappear though a secret tunnel to dance the night away with handsome princes. They would return the next morning, their shoes worn out from dancing. I loved that story, partly because of the new shoes…
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Heart on a Red Sleeve
Prompted By Customer Service
/ Stories
My story begins at the end of a harrowing week, the week my 81 year old father died. His kind heart, the one he always wore on his sleeve, finally gave out. He had warned me in so many words: you never have as much time as you think you do. He died on a…
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The Name Game
Prompted By What's in a Name
/ Stories
My name is Risa. That’s R-I-S-A. When I was growing up, I was the only Risa I had ever heard of. Surrounded by a gaggle of girls named Karen, Kathy, Linda, Carol, Nancy, and Diane, I was one of a kind. I got used to fielding the comments and questions: No, it’s not short for…
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My Dad’s Guide to Living a Rewarding Life
Prompted By What My Father Told Me
/ Stories
This is what I read at my Dad’s funeral in 2001. It sums up many of the life lessons I learned from him. My dad was a teacher, and like many outstanding teachers, he never took time off from teaching. Sure, there were vacations and summers, but he was always on the job. If no…
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Just the Way You Are
Prompted By One Song That Moves Me
/ Stories
Billy Joel’s recording of “Just the Way You Are” was released (or “dropped” as we say now) in September of 1977. By early 1978, the song was still getting a lot of airplay on the radio. During the nearly four months my daughter was in the Intensive Care Nursery at UCSF, my husband and I …
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Six in the City, revisited
Prompted By Snowy Days
/ Stories
The first time I saw snow was the year my family lived in Manhattan. My sister and I attended elementary school across the street from our building. We’d bundle up in our new winter coats, pants, mittens, and boots. Just one winter: getting used to the smell of wet things drying on the radiator, taking…
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Dr. Andrews: A Trailblazer
Prompted By Family Medicine
/ Stories
This prompt gave me the opportunity to write about my pediatrician, Dr.Elizabeth Torrey Andrews. In a weird coincidence, I googled her and discovered an obituary in the Reed College magazine, the college my younger son graduated from. Dr. Andrews was only a Reedie for one year (1923), then transferred to the University of Oregon, following…
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What Are You Going to Be?
Prompted By Trick or Treat?
/ Stories
As kids, we started thinking about the next Halloween on November first. Over the next several months, ideas were floated, refined, discarded, and resurrected. These were the most important decisions a kid could make in those days. As a parent, I had to wait patiently while my kids repeated this cycle of indecision, hoping that…
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A Gift So Nice I Got It Twice
Prompted By Children's Books
/ Stories
The Indoor Noisy Book by Margaret Wise Brown was written in 1942. I received a hardcover copy of it in the 1950s. This book, a colorfully illustrated story of the little dog Muffin who has a cold and must stay inside to rest, was a gift from my across-the-street neighbor John. John was a bit…
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Boy-Crazy in the House of Girls
Prompted By That Summer
/ Stories
“You can’t do that to another girl!” Alex was really pissed. I didn’t understand why she was pissed at me, exactly. It had been her boyfriend’s idea to walk in the summer moonlight and make out in some neighbor’s yard, not mine. It would have remained a regrettable secret, but Alex (not her real…
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The $64,000 Question
Prompted By Quiz and Game Shows
/ Stories
Who was Harold Mendelson? He’s a guy who grew up in the Fillmore District of San Francisco and went on to become a famous actor and game show host. He was also a lifelong buddy of my father’s. You never heard of Harold? But does the name Hal March ring a bell? Even though he…
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Life Off the Fast Lane: Staying Home with kids
Prompted By Stay-at-Home Parent
/ Stories
When I got pregnant with my daughter, I worked at the law school on the UC Berkeley campus, known then as Boalt Hall. I described my position there as “petty bureaucrat,” doing payroll and other administrative duties. It so happened that nine women on the staff became pregnant that year. Rumors circulated among staff that…
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Were We Destined to be Glassholes?
Prompted By Technology Tribulations
/ Stories
(From a blog post I wrote on August 6, 2013, when Google Glass was on the verge of becoming a thing*) I felt inspired to write something about an exhibit I saw at the very wonderful Oakland Museum of California recently. In a little, low tech mock-up garage within the California History gallery, I discovered…
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Table Talk
Prompted By Manners
/ Stories
My husband’s aunt was getting married at a fancy country club, and we were all invited. We decided to take the two older kids and leave the toddler at home with my sister. They got new clothes for the occasion and were drilled over and over about proper table manners for the luncheon that followed…
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The Final Cut
Prompted By Haircuts
/ Stories
“Do you think my hair is falling out?” my sister asked. After going through a round of chemotherapy for lung cancer, hair loss would not be unexpected. She raked her fingers through her hair as she asked, and we both noticed the silver strands she now held in her hand. After a moment, I asked…
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Oh, The Places I’ll Go!
Prompted By One Year of the Pandemic
/ Stories
Last year, the year of lockdown and confinement, I was finally able to achieve a longtime goal: to walk the entire Camino de Santiago–a journey of about 480 miles. And then I decided to climb Mt. Fuji, a short hop of only 46 miles. I am currently traversing the Southern Island of New Zealand, on…
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A Little Dab’ll Do Ya!
Prompted By Advertising Jingles and Slogans
/ Stories
First, to set the scene: My dad and I are sitting on the couch on a Friday night (a Friday night that we don’t go to the synagogue for Shabbat services), and it’s time for the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports’ Friday Night Fights on TV. My dad, first in his family to go to college…
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The Milliner’s Daughter
Prompted By Hats
/ Stories
My mother started making hats right around the time I became a teenager. This was not coincidental, I believe. It was a good time for her to find something to do. Not the happiest of stay-at-home mothers in the 1960s, she desperately needed an outlet. First she helped form a singing group of PTA mothers.…
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Madam President: The Storm Before the Storm
Prompted By Good Trouble
/ Stories
I imagine the smoke-filled room: a group of fat cats sit around a table. Their shirt sleeves are rolled up, they puff on stumpy cigars, their foreheads are slick with sweat. It’s getting late; the hours tick by while the discussion gets heated. Voices get louder and the shouted comments are laced with profanity. Fists…
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The Things We Carried
Prompted By Art and Art Museums
/ Stories
Little Rock, Arkansas is the home of Central High, the Clinton Library—and the only dedicated purse museum in the United States. Although not a traditional art museum, I think the ESSE Purse Museum exhibits a different kind of art: symbols of the lives of women in a one-of-a-kind collection of clutches, crossovers, and cavernous carryalls.…
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Time Travelers, Tigers, and Queens: Oh my!
Prompted By What Are You Bingeing?
/ Stories
Let me just clarify at the outset: I have been stress knitting for months now, ever since this lockdown, shelter-in-place, doomscrolling life we are living began. I need something to look at so my eyes don’t cross (or close) while I’m knitting away. I say this because I have binge watched a staggering amount of…
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It Was a Dark and Stormy Night
Prompted By Hello Darkness
/ Stories
December 14th, 1997. One of the longest droughts in California history ended the night my daughter was born. The rain started sometime in the afternoon. I couldn’t tell you when, exactly. We were waiting to find out what was wrong with her and why she had failed her first test: the Apgar. One of the…
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There Was an Interview Here
Prompted By Interviews
/ Stories
In the Spring of 2016, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by one of my favorite teachers at Saint Mary’s College– Alex Green. Although I was a little bit nervous, Alex is such a great interviewer that I got comfortable onstage with him immediately. We were there to talk about my recently published memoir,…
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My Time as a Volunteer in the Back of the Pirate Supply Store
Prompted By Volunteering
/ Stories
As the story goes, the property on Valencia Street was zoned for retail. But the new tenants wanted to open a tutoring center. Naturally, the solution was to start stocking up on pirate stuff. The Pirate Supply Store at 826 Valencia is really a front for a place where kids in San Francisco can get…
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Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button?
Prompted By Buttons, Pins, and Badges
/ Stories
And the winner is: My aunt Ruth! I’ve written about my Aunt Ruth and her buttons here and in my book. She inspired me to start my own collection when I was a teenager. I kept them in a small box inside my grandparents’ secretary desk. On more than one occasion, I talked to my…
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A Pair About Shoes
Prompted By Shoes
/ Stories
Well, since this is a prompt about shoes, I figured that a pair of stories would be fitting. The first one is an excerpt from my book. The Red Shoes They were fire-engine red. Cherries in the snow red, million-dollar red; movie star pouty lips, just like on Mad Men red—an I-mean-business red. They had…
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Here’s to Life
Prompted By Final Farewell
/ Stories
” I want lots of roses,” my sister said. This was the first time she directly spoke about the inevitability of her death, acknowledging that some kind of farewell or celebration would be held for her. And she had a few ideas. I grabbed a note pad and we started planning what would become a…
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Boustrophedonic Musings
Prompted By Brain Games
/ Stories
What does plowing a field have to do with knitting, one may ask. The answer: As knitters know, when knitting an intarsia pattern one reads the pattern from right to left, and in the following row from left to right. This type of writing/notation is known as boustrophedon. The word originates from the Greek: as…
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My Pink Dress
Prompted By Lost and Found
/ Stories
The Pink Dress None of this was supposed to happen: not finding the dress, not losing the dress, and certainly not finding it again. But that’s what did happen. In the days before you could make online reservations, my husband used the services of a trusted travel agent for his business trips and some…
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Second Hand Rose
Prompted By Yard Sales
/ Stories
“What in the world will we do with all this stuff?” Soon after our mother passed away, my sister and I were faced with the daunting task that so many of our generation are dealing with these days: sorting through a lifetime’s accumulation of clothes, jewelry, tchotchkes, and mementos. Drawer after drawer revealed scarves, purses,…
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Letters to my Mother
Prompted By Forgiveness
/ Stories
I wrote a series of letters to my mother around Mother’s Day, ten years after her death: my attempt to get to a place of forgiveness. Dear Mom, I guess we were a mismatch from the beginning. You wanted a boy; you got me: a scabby-kneed tree-climber, a girl who played with mud and tar…
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Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, Yet Again
Prompted By Protests
/ Stories
This piece originally appeared in 2018 for the Student Activism prompt. Now in 2020, once again young activists are taking a leading role in the Black Lives Matter movement, taking it to the streets and the seats of government as a beleaguered nation is forced to face its history of systemic racism while a devastating…
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The Mowing of Summer Lawns
Prompted By My Hometown
/ Stories
At dinner time, dads cup their hands around their mouths and call their kids home.
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Martha My Dear
Prompted By Timing is Everything
/ Stories
"It was bashert," she used to say, using the Yiddish word for destiny
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That’s Life
Prompted By Magazines
/ Stories
The photographs in LIFE captured powerful moments, whether the subjects were soldiers, politicians, athletes, poets and writers, Hollywood stars, or everyday people.
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The Enchanted Castle Cake
Prompted By Recipes
/ Stories
It was more than just a cake; it was an architectural marvel.
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A Visit from my Sister
Prompted By Dreams
/ Stories
There I am, waiting for my shampoo to begin, when my sister emerges from behind the curtain at the back of the salon.
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M-I-C…K-E-Y… M-O-U-S-E!
Prompted By Children's TV Shows
/ Stories
He was my first crush. Cubby O’Brian played the drums on The Mickey Mouse Club. Much to my dismay, he was always paired up with Karen*, who had pretty blonde curls. I didn’t look anything like this: Not me. No way. When I saw an article in the SF Chronicle about the Disney Family Museum,…
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Time in a Bottle
Prompted By Snail Mail
/ Stories
Or, more accurately: Time captured in a batch of letters. After my mother passed away in 2007, my sister and I found a stash of letters tucked away in my mom’s old cedar hope chest, along with some of what we assumed was her honeymoon lingerie. What a find! I’d forgotten about the letters, but…
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Nu? So It’s Christmas
Prompted By Holidaze
/ Stories
While I enjoyed talking about eight days of presents, what I didn't talk about was how many of my gifts were practical things, like, oh, socks, for example.
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We Are Family
Prompted By Cousins
/ Stories
Once we were six, and now we are five. First cousins. We lined up like this: my sister, the oldest; the only boy; two of us born a few months apart; the middle of three sisters; and the baby. We posed for pictures together from the time we were toddlers. In the beginning, there were…
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Who Wrote the Book of Love?
Prompted By Baby Books
/ Stories
When I was an adult, I found a little blue booklet with a few pages of notes written by my mother. She had filled in my name, my date of birth, weight, doctor's name, and a list of which shots I was given and when, with a reference to how much and what kind of formula I was fed. End of story.
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Crush Redux
Prompted By The Crush
/ Stories
Those eyes, the black turtlenecks, the bon mots and literary references...Ilya was smart and sexy and mysterious.
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A Place of Wonder
Prompted By Libraries
/ Stories
The Children's Room became my domain. This is where I first started reading about Beezus and Ramona, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, Amelia Earhart, Emma Lazarus,The All-of-a-Kind Family, Charlotte, Nancy Drew, and the magic stories of Edward Eager.
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He Was the Egg Man
Prompted By An Unforgettable Person
/ Stories
Throughout my childhood, Grampa Mike was always there : birthdays, holidays, ordinary days...and he used to show up with a flat of eggs and maybe some roses that were a little past their prime.
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Ain’t Gonna Lie
Prompted By Honesty
/ Stories
Honestly, if I didn’t skirt around the truth when I was a teenager I never would’ve had any fun. Was I dishonest? On occasion, yes. And on one occasion I got out of a jam by being honest after I got myself into said jam by cheating. Let me explain. For some reason I no…
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Try to Remember…
Prompted By Honeymoon
/ Stories
September 2, 1973 We began our honeymoon with an afterparty at a nearby restaurant. Several of our friends came along from the wedding; we shared some additional toasts at the bar before my brand-new husband and I drove to the airport to begin our long weekend away. Times being what they were, what with my…
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A Date at Eight
Prompted By First Dates
/ Stories
I’m sure we thought we were terribly grown up, going on a date and all. Did my mother make me wear gloves? She may have.
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A Long and Winding Road
Prompted By College Majors as Career Gaugers
/ Stories
"Notably the Berkeley School of Criminology was targeted by key players in the US military-industrial complex such as Ronald Reagan himself, then Governor of California and Regent of UC-Berkeley."
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PE and other Sorrows
Prompted By PE Pleasures and Perils
/ Stories
Before I can start talking about PE, I need to explain a couple of things. When I was in elementary school (fifth grade, I think), I came down with pneumonia. I believe I missed an entire month of school. The teacher had all the kids in my class send me get well cards, which I…
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Of Shoes–and Ships–and Sealing Wax
Prompted By Poetry
/ Stories
I eat my peas with honey,
I've done it all my life.
It makes the peas taste funny,
But it keeps them on my knife. --Gelett Burgess
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No FOMO for me!
Prompted By Spring Break
/ Stories
Back before FOMO was a thing, it never dawned on me to do anything on “spring break.” Now, what do we think about when we think about spring break anyway? Off to the beach or the slopes, depending–right? College or high school kids up to no good, shenanigans and high jinks that these days are…
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2725 Haste Street
Prompted By My First Apartment
/ Stories
I couldn’t wait to move out of my parents’ house after high school. I had decided to take what is now referred to as a “gap year,” and got no end of flak from my parents about it. I went searching for a job so I could make the first and last months’ rent for…
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How We Like Our Eggs
Prompted By Grandparents & Grandchildren
/ Stories
The skin on my grandmother’s hands was paper thin. It’s what I remember most about her. She also had piercing brown eyes and a way of clamping her lips together that signaled her disapproval. She wasn’t a warm and affectionate sort of grandmother. Not at all. She was more of a “my way or the…
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He Was the Egg Man
Prompted By Grandparents & Grandchildren
/ Stories
He bought us ice cream and pretended to scold us when we stuck out our tongues to lick our cones. When we sat next to him with food on our plates, he'd look surprised and point at something behind us. We'd turn around to look, and he'd have taken a bite of our sandwich. His big blue eyes gave nothing away--he was innocent!
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An Unexpected Education
Prompted By The Draft & Vietnam
/ Stories
I found myself sitting next to women my age, or not much older, who were military wives. They came from the Midwest, the South and back East.....Their husbands were off fighting in Vietnam while these young wives held down a job, kept house, took care of the car, called the refrigerator repairman, paid the bills, and tried to stay sane.
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Chains of Love
Prompted By Accessorize, Accessorize
/ Stories
I began wearing an anklet when I'd outgrown little girl ankle socks and graduated to cheap mesh stockings in shades of a summer tan, worn over smooth legs. I went to Woolworths and used my allowance to buy my first anklet. My sister and I both wore them, copying one of our beloved aunts who wore a fancy one that had a tiny flower with a pearl in its center, with her name engraved on it.
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Great Moments in Parenting
Prompted By Parenthood
/ Stories
Parents, we’ve all had these moments, right? Right?? One day my daughter invited a friend from school over to play. I’ll call this friend Jane, because that is her name. Jane was eight or nine–a year older than my daughter–and since her mom and I were friends, the girls had spent time together before, sometimes…
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RIP VCRs
Prompted By Good Riddance
/ Stories
Oh, it was so great at the beginning. My husband brought home the machine from his office and we went off the the video rental store and wandered the aisles like kids in a candy store. On a weekend, after the kids went to bed, we’d watch movies back to back, remembering to “be kind…
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Masterpiece Dinner
Prompted By What We Ate
/ Stories
We were looking at a ridiculously expensive cut of meat that we were instructed to stud with truffles, brush with brandy, brown in butter, slather with a mixture of more butter blended with pâté, and finally wrap like a precious gem in a buttery dough.
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With Gratitude: Mean Girls
Prompted By Middle School
/ Stories
While gaggles of kids talked and laughed at lunch, I found a quiet corner and savored my solitude as I ate my sandwich alone. Thanks to a thoughtful custodian who unlocked a room for me, I could avoid being seen; I spent my period of exile in silent, and sometimes salty, contemplation.
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Well, Hello!
Prompted By Fame
/ Stories
This isn’t about my fame or lack of it. This is about secondhand fame. To be precise, this is about my father’s famous friend: Carol Channing. My dad grew up in San Francisco, and as a precursor to his eventual career as a drama teacher, he got involved in theater during his high school years.…
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There Was a Fire Here
Prompted By Fire
/ Stories
Excerpted from my memoir, There Was a Fire Here. October 20, 1991. Oakland, California — There was a fire here. It started high above our house, on a hill facing west. No one knows for certain how it started, but a human hand set something burning and started The Fire. The fire incinerated, it eliminated; it…
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Ball of Confusion*
Prompted By 1968
/ Stories
1968. High school. Last half of junior year, first half of senior year. Waiting for my life to start for real. Yearning to move on. Falling in love, falling in lust, making some bad choices and a couple of good ones, trying new things, boys on my mind, unhappy at home, hard truths, assassinations, end…
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Sunnyside Up in Panzano*
Prompted By Nudity
/ Stories
This must be the way things are done here, I thought. No turning back now. So I focused on the ceiling fan as it spun in a lazy circle, thinking about how I would describe this feeling to my friends.
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Triumph Over My Arch Nemeses
Prompted By Hair
/ Stories
I was never really satisfied, but basically gave up on achieving the ideal arch I'd been searching for most of my life. I mean, while doing other things and actually HAVING a life.
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one’s not half two, it’s two are halves of one
Prompted By Weddings
/ Stories
I woke up that morning thinking: today I will glow. I always heard that brides get this special glow you can’t fake or create with makeup, it just happens the day you get married, so I checked the mirror expecting to find it, except it wasn’t there yet, and I thought, well, maybe it creeps…
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Requiem for a Teacher
Prompted By Teachers & Mentors
/ Stories
Wesley was an important figure to me at a time when I felt excited, scared, adventurous, and doubtful. He read my words, praised me, and called me out. I felt appreciated and challenged by him.
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Numbers
Prompted By Those We Miss
/ Stories
My sister checks in with the woman behind the counter, signing her name and mentioning what she’s there for. It hardly seems necessary to mention this. Everyone who enters this room, unless they are a support person like me, is here for one reason: they have cancer.
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Meeting Madeleine
Prompted By Babies
/ Stories
My journey to meet Madeleine began with a phone call. I was in the midst of cleaning out my late mother’s kitchen, standing in front of her pantry looking at boxes and cans dating back to the 20th century, when my son-in-law reached me on my cell phone. “I guess you know why I’m calling,”…
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Easy Reader
Prompted By What We Read
/ Stories
One of my favorite things to do when I was a kid: Grab a book and climb a tree and read until someone came looking for me.
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Waist deep in the big muddy. Again.
Prompted By Student Activism
/ Stories
As I’ve been following the young activists today who are taking a leadership role in a fight my generation seemed to have given up on, it brought me back to another time when young people felt both helpless and passionate about a cause. In our day, it was the anti-war movement. What is tragically similar…
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My Aunt Rocks!
Prompted By Aunts & Uncles
/ Stories
Her name is Rockie, but don’t take her for granite. One of her jokes. Her given name is Rokama. According to several sources I consulted, in Hebrew the name means “comforted.” Or beloved. Or one who has received mercy. Or possibly: compassion. They all fit. If I had to name some of the influential women…
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My Aunt Ruth
Prompted By Aunts & Uncles
/ Stories
Aunt Ruth used to chide me when I complained about being exhausted after chasing my young children around. “In my day,” she said, “we’d put the kids to bed—and then figure out how to save the world!” Saving the world meant throwing herself into the fray: she’d hoist a sign, march and demonstrate in the…
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Meeting Madeleine
Prompted By How We Met
/ Stories
My journey to meet Madeleine began with a phone call. I was in the midst of cleaning out my late mother’s kitchen, standing in front of her pantry looking at boxes and cans dating back to the 20th century, when my son-in-law reached me on my cell phone. “I guess you know why I’m calling,”…
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Alice’s Restaurant
Prompted By Restaurants
/ Stories
In 1971, I was living in Berkeley, California. I attended classes on campus and also worked there as I put myself through school at UC Berkeley. I lived in a house with three roommates, a large tank of tropical fish, my two cats, and an Old English sheepdog. My boyfriend spent his freshman year away,…
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Gone with the Wind
Prompted By Best Picture
/ Stories
I first read the book when I was a teenager. It’s the only book I missed two meals to finish. I staggered out of my bedroom late in the afternoon after turning the last page. I’d been lost for what seemed like days in the lives of Scarlett, Ashley, Melanie and Rhett. My parents must…
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Both Sides Now
Prompted By How We Met
/ Stories
This is how it started. I asked him to write down the lyrics to “Both Sides Now” for me. We were both seniors in high school, hanging out in the same circle of hippie wannabe ne’er do-wells. The song was on the radio all the time and I wanted to learn the words. I knew…
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Sunshine of My Love
Prompted By Teenager in Love
/ Stories
The last time I saw Kelly, he’d been dead for over a year. In yet another dream, he was sitting next to me on a bus. “You have to let me go,” he said. When I met him, in 1966, Kelly was a junior in high school. He was outrageous, audacious, charismatic, and sexy as…
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The Old Ballgame
Prompted By Sports
/ Stories
Family legend has it that my dad fully expected me, his second daughter, to be a son. I imagine him pacing in the waiting room in the maternity ward, punching his fist in a glove, thinking about the times he’d play catch in the backyard and discuss the finer points of the game with a…
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Six in the City: A Year in the Life
Prompted By A Year in the Life
/ Stories
The year: 1957-1958. I was six and my sister was eight when our parents told these two San Francisco-born California girls that we were packing up and moving to New York City. My father had entered the doctoral program at Teachers College, Columbia University, and we’d be living in Morningside Heights for a year—giving up…
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A Long, Strange Trip
Prompted By Drugs and Alcohol
/ Stories
Thanks to a program that no longer exists, I was able to attend the local college while still a senior in high school. After filling out the necessary paperwork and expressing my urgent need to study Italian—a class not offered at my school—I was approved to begin classes on campus in the fall of 1968.…
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A Wish Fulfilled. . .The Hard Way
Prompted By Be Careful What You Wish For
/ Stories
When my husband and I bought our first house after years of being renters, we were excited but a little bit terrified. The night before we made our offer, neither one of us got any sleep. We had looked and looked, and then one day the mother of one of our daughter’s kindergarten classmates told…
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And in the End
Prompted By Beatles vs Stones
/ Stories
The Beatles break-up began in 1969, the year I graduated from high school. I wished it weren’t so, but it was inevitable that they would go their separate ways, just as it was inevitable that high school would end, and everything would change.
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Halloween Caper with My Daughter
Prompted By Halloween
/ Stories
Caitlin, my daughter, spent several months in the Intensive Care Nursery as an infant. She needed open heart surgery and ended up spending several months recovering, having setbacks, and recovering, before she was finally able to come home at around four months of age. The ICN was full of babies who were too small or…
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