• The Magician’s Assistant

    picture found here PARSIFAL IS DEAD. That is the end of the story. The technician and the nurse rushed in from their glass booth. Where there had been a perfect silence a minute before there was now tremendous activity, the straining sounds of two men unexpectedly thrown into hard work. The technician stepped between Parsifal and Sabine, and she had no choice but to let go of Parsifal’s hand. When they counted to three and then lifted Parsifal’s body from the metal tongue of the MRI machine and onto the gurney, his head fell back, his mouth snapping open with no reflexes to protect it. Sabine saw all of his…

  • Friday Randomness

    Happy Birthday to my wonderful super amazing husband, Ted!  I got confused last night and wrote, “Happy 38” on our calendar.  That’s 10 years ago.  To celebrate his birthday, Ted likes to go for special birthday rides on his bike.  One year over the Golden Gate Bridge, another year over near Benicia.   This year he wants to ride up in the Marin Headlands.  So I’m playing hookey from work, and I’ll drive in with him.  I don’t even have a bike, so I won’t be riding, but I’ll drop him off on the SF side of the GG Bridge, then I’ll drive over to Sausalito.  I’ll have a nice walk…

  • Roasted Butterflied Chicken and Tomatillos

    OK, first things first. My celebrity crush is Curtis Stone. We went to San Francisco to have him sign a copy of his cookbook back in ’07, and he was utterly charming. And now he’s engaged to, and has an adorable baby with, Lindsey Price, who played Janet on Beverly Hills 90210 back in the day. It’s like two parts of my world coming together in one beautiful place, and I’ll confess…when I picture Curtis and Lindsey barbequing in the back yard, they’re in the Walsh house. So what? Anyway, I’m a fan of Curtis on Facebook, and sometimes he puts delicious pictures up, of recipes from his new cookbook.…

  • Mathilda Savitch

    Da gets up to go and he pats my dirty hair and I suppose I should be ashamed, but what do I care about anything anyway.  That’s part of being awful, not caring.  And then what’s part of it too is the thought that suddenly jumps into my head.  The thought that it could be a person’s own mother who might make a doll with her daughter’s hair and throw it into a fire.  She’d watch the flames eat it up and then she’d dance off to bed laughing and having sex and bleeding little drops of perfume all over the sheets as if there was nothing to it.  I…

  • Revenge

    There’s something about grandchildren, where they exact revenge upon the parents, and the grandparents sit back and laugh.  When I was young, I did this or that or the other thing to my mom, which surely drove her crazy.  She survived whatever it was, but then, when Maya came along and did to those same things to me, and drove me nuts, HA!  My mom was so happy.  Grandchildren are the best revenge, right? What I didn’t know before, was that children can also be some kind of revenge exacted upon your grandparents as well.  (See how I skipped an entire generation there?  Crazy, huh?)  Way back when I was…

  • Friday Randomness

    We went to see ‘From Up On Poppy Hill‘ last weekend, which is the latest film by the creator of Spirited Away, Ponyo, and My Neighbor Totoro. This film is different from the others in that there are no supernatural forces or characters at work. Rather, this is a story about two teenagers in Japan at the lead-up to the 1964 Olympics, and deals with the juxtaposition of tradition vs. modernism at that time. It was very sweet, very enjoyable, and I recommend it, though the ending was a bit abrupt. I do like all of these films, quite a bit. Is Obama an idiot for suggesting that the answer…

  • The Dog Stars

    I fished. I’d set down my pack against a still green tree. The kayak sled. My rifle. I passed up the beetle kill, the standing dead trees that broke and fell in a hard wind, and walked further into the green. I always fished a stretch of woods that had not died, or that was coming back. I set down the pack and breathed the smell of running water, of cold stone, of fir and spruce, like the sachets my mother used to keep in a sock drawer. I breathed and thanked something that was not exactly God, something that was still here. I could almost imagine that it was…

  • Friday Randomness

    This week was Spring Break for Maya, and I decided to take the week off from work as well. I’ve been with my company for 12 years now, with one 5 month hiatus when I was laid off, and I accrue vacation time pretty quickly, but we’re not allowed to have a lot on the books, so I take a random Friday off here and there, but once in awhile I need to take a week off. The week started off busy busy busy. Friday I had errands galore to run, as we had a houseful of teens coming over on Saturday to help Maya celebrate her birthday. Then we…

  • Pesto Salmon

    Yesterday found Ted and me at the grocery store, trying to figure out what to have for dinner. I kind of wanted salmon, so we got that. We had leftover mashed potatoes at home, and ingredients for salad, so all we had to worry about was the main course. Mango salsa is very easy to put on salmon, but they were out. So we just bought the salmon and came home, and looked around in the fridge to see what we had. Oh, look, pesto! Yay! So I looked online and found this recipe, which has lovely pictures and a blog post all her own, and she gives original credit…

  • Braised Chicken with Artichokes and Olives

    A few weeks ago I was driving around delivering meals to the old people, and sort of listening to a program on our local NPR station. It was a pretty interesting program, but I was getting in and out of the car every couple of minutes, so I missed a lot of it. Anyway, the host was interviewing a panel of guests, and the topic was eating for a longer life. If you’re so inclined, you can listen here. There was talk about when to eat, the recommendation being to allow at least 12 hours, 16 if you can manage it, between your last meal of the day and your…

  • Happy 17th Birthday, Maya!

    Gah, look at that face! She was so little, so young, so cute. Now…she’s gorgeous, funny, kind, smart, and growing up SO FAST it’s causing my head to spin. She’s 17 years old. I cannot fathom that sometimes. She’s driving (taking her test soon). She’s finishing up her Junior year of high school, and it’s all about colleges and SATs and the prom. How did this happen to me? Wait, not me. Her. How did she grow up so darned fast? Sometimes I can believe it’s been 17 years since she was born. Other times it is almost as though the in-between years never happened, and she was a baby,…

  • The Sense of An Ending

    Illustration for the Guardian by Neal Fox, found here. The Guardian has an interesting feature, where they distilled the admittedly short novella into just a few paragraphs, all while pretty much keeping the voice. Don’t read it if you’re going to read the book, obviously. “Indeed, isn’t the whole business of ascribing responsibility a kind of cop-out? We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals. Or it’s all anarchic chaos, with the same consequence. It seems to me that there is – was – a chain of individual responsibilities, all of which were necessary,…

  • Disgrace

    Absolutely appropriate cartoon perhaps via Yoe! Books, though found on FB She does not resist. All she does is avert herself; avert her lips, avert her eyes. She lets him lay her out on the bed and undress her: she even helps him, raising her arms and then her hips. Little shivers of cold run through her; as soon as she is bare, she slips under the quilted counterpane like a mole burrowing, and turns her back on him. Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the…