Category: Random

  • Your rose, your thorn, and your bud

    My friend Tyler’s buddy asks his kids this question every night: “What are your rose, your thorn, and your bud?” Your rose is the happiest moment of the day. The thorn, the worst part of your day: what’s bothering you or keeping you back. And your bud is what you’re excited about learning or doing next.…

  • Thankful

    There are so many moments of beauty and joy in our days. Small moments with the kids. Their eyes. Their stories. Hugs. It’s crazy beautiful. Alejandro and Story Jane, my husband, our life…I feel blessed. “The stars shone on you,” said our caregiver the other day. It’s true. I feel it, and want to share.…

  • the Holiday bawl

    I bawled on Christmas Eve day. It was a hearty, completely-losing-it weepfest. It felt pretty good to cry as I fought to finish the handmade cherry pie. As my daughter didn’t take her afternoon nap. Oh yes, woe! I was wallowing in woes. Most of my own making.

  • A Dream

    I’m trying to get to the east bay. In run-down SF I borrow my mom’s old white Honda. I find it in a parking lot parked behind another car. I have to explain to the parking attendant that I didn’t know we couldn’t park there. (Those spaces reserved for someone else.) I promise that next…

  • Glorious Failures

    The following is reprinted with permission from When I Was There, an anthology of life at U.C. Berkeley from the ’60s till now. The super conservative former college…the café I opened at age twenty in San Antonio (“Can I get a taco with that latté?”)…the pot fragrance company…all of these glorious failures prepared me. When…

  • Money Changes Everything: the Bay Bridge Carpool Toll

    I yearn for the simpler days when we weren’t all talking about, and exchanging, money in the mutually beneficent system known as Casual Carpool.

  • Going Back

    And all I had to do for a week was to care for Alejandro–which wasn’t half as hard as it is here, when I’m working and constantly running around–and to show him the small things I remembered: the dock, the clams, the constant need for life jackets and bug spray.