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Parents
Precedent
In 1975 I came to love Faye Henry. She was thirty-five years older than I and necessary for my mother, who had no friends at Harvard until she and Faye Henry fell asleep together in the back of “Practicum in Ethnographic Futures Research,” knew they were destined to be friends, and have been ever since.
July 1982Celluloid Children
Grandma was a person of the Middle Kingdom. The center of civilized life. With one hand she propped up a star-gazer, and with the other she reached down to the bowels of life to offer a hand to the lost and bewildered.
June 1982Sunbeams
May 1982There are said to be creative pauses, pauses that are as good as death, empty and dead as death itself. And in these awful pauses the evolutionary change takes place.
The Funeral
He remembered feeling sick with fear. She had been breathing with difficulty, the air making a rasping sound in her throat. She sounded different — almost impolite. Sounds that used to mean Nana were the floating notes of her harpsichord, the soft rustle of the pages she turned in story books, songs half hummed half whispered, and the small clicking of her knitting needles.
May 1982The Every-Other-Friday-Afternoon Bridge Luncheon
As far as I know, my grandmother’s only regret in life was that she died on a Thursday. “Damnation!” she cursed fate in front of her sister Gert, her four children, and her thirteen grandchildren.
February 1982Kali Comes Home
It is a short-term hurt for a long-term heal; I suddenly understand, not through some feat of logic but through living alone with the only thing I have ever had or will ever have — the pearl of my Isness. I am not alone, I am the beloved, I am understood, and there is nothing I need ever change.
November 1981