Searching Stories

We did not relish listening to praise and platitudes about a woman who was, to put it charitably, hard to get along with. Read More

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… Read More

In the early 1950’s, my grandmother lived along the highway between Palm Springs and Los Angeles. She raised chickens and sold sold fryers on ice and eggs. Between her wood-slatted hen houses were two eucalyptus stumps. One stump was my haven from the headless chickens that ran flapping and spurting blood. I was Caesar, fascinated… Read More

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! Read More

I was crying for what isn’t, for the work and feeling that has gone into the Christmas music for as long there has been Christmas music, and for the sad, mostly uselessness of it. Read More