Archive for the ‘Posts’ Category

Posts

August 12, 2022

The Slow Track

My automobile insurer has a program called Right Track, a device to help you get a discount –up to 30%– on your car insurance. It’s an app you install on your phone; using GPS, the company tracks your driving for three months. When they decide how much of a good driver discount you deserve, you  Read the Rest…

Posts

May 8, 2022

The Do in Berkeley, Part One

A long weekend in Berkeley was more than my first post-pandemic travel. It had been twenty five years since I had been in the Bay Area; that time was also to visit my college roommate and longest friend, Mary-Ellis. In 1997, as a response to breaking up with a boyfriend, I drove from Seattle to  Read the Rest…

FriendsPaintingPostsTravel

October 2, 2021

Kay at the Beach

Kay and I packed our identical painting kits, ones we had bought together at the Art Spot in Edmonds and 50 times the amount of food we would need or come close to eating and travelled to The Sandpiper at Pacific Beach in a driving rainstorm. It was to be three days of painting and  Read the Rest…

FriendsGardenPosts

April 8, 2016

The Lovesome Garden

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“The garden is a lovesome thing, God wot.” Thomas Edward Brown As I walk around my own garden in early April, I feel like I do when I unpack the Christmas tree ornaments and see my old friends: Sweet violets in the spring.  I have a lot of them this year: patches of sweetness all  Read the Rest…

BooksPostsWorld War II

August 10, 2015

Make Way for the Spies

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Thus summer’s reading project is a continuation of what began nearly a year ago and continues without an end in sight: World War II. It began with the S.O.E. spies, broadened into the French Resistance and slopped over into the Nazis until I was reading pretty much anything about World War II except the actual  Read the Rest…

BooksLiteraturePoemsPoliticsPostsPsychoanalysisThe Norton Anthology

October 3, 2013

In Which I Take on the Wife of Bath

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I’d heard about this woman: sexually voracious, loud mouth, obscene, headstrong, selfish, power-hungry, and immoral. I was eager to meet her. News flash: she is none of those things in my estimation. Here, word for word, is how we might expect to describe a man similar in nature to the wife of Bath: man of  Read the Rest…

BooksLiteraturePoemsPostsThe Norton AnthologyWriting

June 20, 2013

This Norton Anthology My Prison

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In which I find in Samuel Taylor Coleridge a kindred soul. It might be his struggle with depression.  It might be his experience—so common to women—of feeling that nothing he does is respected as much as something a(nother) man does, in this case Wordsworth.  The two of them conceived of a book they called Lyrical  Read the Rest…

PoliticsPosts

April 30, 2012

Vagina is not a Four Letter Word

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Two months ago a woman in Michigan named Karen Teegarden called her friend Desiree Jordan in New York.  They both wondered why women all over this country weren’t marching in the streets in response to hundreds of pieces of state legislation that many of us feel are whittling away at women’s dignity, autonomy and rights  Read the Rest…

Ah, HumanityPostsPsychoanalysisSpirituality

May 31, 2011

The Unruly Kingdom

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I grew up with a religious education that pretty much killed religion for me so of course, I ended up being a church musician.  I fought against it and actually got fired from a church job once because I didn’t have the outward behavior they expected of staff.  One of the many complaints against me  Read the Rest…

Choir SingingPostsTeachingTelevision

May 12, 2011

The OK on TV

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There was a regular rodeo at the OK Chorale last week when a TV crew filmed a rehearsal.  Joe Fryer from King-TV and I had been in negotiations for a week about a story on the Chorale.  A week ago Tuesday he asked if they could film us the next day. Up until then I  Read the Rest…