What I Find Fascinating

10 Apr at 5:05 pm

Perils of Watching A Movie In A Hotel Room…

So there Bill and I were celebrating his 92nd birthday at a Marriott hotel in San Francisco, at the end of a long day, pleasantly weary, wanting to watch Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon. I navigated through the user-unfriendly menu on…

19 Feb at 2:09 pm

Lemon Marmalade Than Which There Is No Whicher

In the Kitchen, at the Table

This morning at the market I was reminded that these late winter days are still Citrus Season. Time to make marmalade! Lemon and lime marmalades are easiest and surest because they can be put up purely themselves. Orange and other…

7 Feb at 6:05 pm

Making Vegetable Soup

In the Kitchen, at the Table

Here are the basics…have fun with it…make enough for two or three nights…and if you can, use organic ingredients. Cut a 3- to -4-inch red* onion in half, peel, trim away root and stem ends, slice 1/8th inch thick, maybe…

27 Jan at 4:12 pm

On Not Getting Rid of “Stuff”

Aging Ain’t for Sissies

There are those in our family–on both sides of the aisle–who are pressing us to “get rid of stuff.” They themselves, in their sixties, are getting rid of “stuff.” Why are they doing that? “So my kids won’t have to.”…

20 Jan at 3:48 pm

What Is Love Anyway?

What I Find Fascinating

Hey, what is love anyway? I keep asking Bill, “Who loves you more than anyone was ever loved?” and of course he answers, “I’ve no idea…” And just now, asking him, it occurred to me, What is love anyway? What…

12 Jan at 3:26 pm

Messiness As Art

Becoming My Own Best Self

I’m putting my study to rights. I’m told Albert Schweitzer and Alexander Calder also had absurdly messy studies. That comforts me. I’m in good—nay, secure—company. No one can make fun of me. Except for decades friends have been taking pictures…

6 Jan at 8:24 pm

More Word Play

What I Find Fascinating

Home again, and driving the winding road up the Santa Cruz Sandhills to fetch Uschi from her friends in Bonny Doon, I turned a corner and ahead of us crossing the road were three huge wild turkeys! Naturally I stopped,…

2 Jan at 6:25 pm

Words from Ninety-one Years Ago for a Spanking New 2022…

What I Find Fascinating

A page from my mother’s 1931 journal. Living in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Gloria Stuart Newell was twenty-one and married to a gifted but penniless young sculptor. By day she was writer/editor/typesetter/printer on The Carmelite newspaper…by night she acted/stage managed at the Theater…

22 Dec 2021

The Annual Accounting

Taking Stock

Writing indoors as torrents of rain shush down outside our windows–no drought here in Kauai as there is in Santa Cruz… And so the end of the year draws nigh…time to take stock…where’ve I been…where’m I going?…will I be able…

14 Dec 2021

Pleasures and Comforts of Ginger

In the Kitchen, at the Table

Most who know me know my fresh ginger cake. Easily made and versatile—in the oven in a trice, finished simply with powdered sugar or Laurie Colwin’s slathering of chocolate icing–ginger cake is, I think, one of the world’s great confections.…