meal prep the boxes of dried pasta in my pantry are harbingers invitations to improvisation promises that dinner can be something even on nights when I don’t know what to cook set a pot of water to boil and then open the fridge and find what wants to be cooked leftovers whose time has come…
puzzling the last time I saw a puzzle spread out across the table was at my mother’s apartment some time after my dad died we sat across from each other she and I like we did when I was in high school each of us choosing a section the picture to complete but we never…
meal as metaphor this penultimate night of the year was the night to make something out of everything to use up–no–to make the best out of a few things whose refrigerator visas had run out a pork tenderloin baby potatoes and green beans all had promise the supporting cast included olive oil cornstarch buttermilk panko…
without you if I quote the words you can probably say them with me “you’ve been given a great gift George: a chance to see what the world would be like without you” but the gift of without that most of us get comes wrapped as grief the chance to learn what the world is…
the work of the people the liturgy of our life together begins with breakfast or a walk certainly a coffee some days the invocation is offered by NPR or TODAY a podcast or an old song we exchange the reading of our calendars, listing our obligations and appointments we go through motions intending to make…
hippo, hooray I’ve done my share of writing about the weight of the world but here are a few weightless words of joy for a day spent walking talking eating laughing building memories in a town where none of us lives yet we created a space of belonging for one another because that’s what friends…
weather report when I was in high school dad told me to be a weatherman “you can be wrong everyday and you never get fired” I walked to coffee this morning in cold sunshine said the sky looked like snow this afternoon and sent the schnauzers out in the rain tonight who could see that…
I have struggled to write tonight. I have been sitting at the screen for a couple of hours and have three or four beginnings to poems that should not be finished. Somewhere in my search for something, I remembered a poem I wrote many years ago–when I was teaching high school–and it has remained important…
zoom before the word was a way to talk across the pandemic or sent kids around the room Zoom was the nickname of one who captivated my country with the way he played football I was a child in Zambia kicking soccer balls in the backyard and chanting his name as we sat in the…
most of our stories go untold to those around us or perhaps they are unheard misunderstood because they we are not fluent in each other it’s unfair I suppose to say anything about most of our stories as though they could be collected in a single volume the library of humanity isn’t so easily contained…