Category Archives: Uncategorized

Gradual School, Revisited

It’s that time of year again…graduation season. Been there, done that.Wrote about it too, here and here.This is a recap for the GenFab website. I had raced through my UC Berkeley undergraduate program at lightning speed—taking a mere nineyears to earn my bachelor’s degree. By the time I collected that hard-won diploma, I was married,Continue Reading

The Call of the Void

 In a recent  article in The Wall Street Journal, Chris Allbritton puts a name to the feeling that I’ve had more and more frequently when I’m up high and looking down: l’appel du vide, or the call of the void. He describes it this way: “It’s an urge, when you reach the edge of a highContinue Reading

Great balls of…?

…no, not fire this time. Yarn.  (This is an updated version of an earlier post) Not me, or Marsha            I’ve been knitting since my friend Marsha taught me how back in high school. Which means a lot of knits and purls and dropped stitches over the years.           All the sweaters I’d ever made over Continue Reading

Memories of Dad

A tribute to my father Sharing a laugh on Father’s Day My dad always told me  I was a writer. He said this with admiration, I think. He encouraged me to write and would often help me when I got stuck.  When I was taking an upper division English class as a freshman at Cal, heContinue Reading

M-i-c…k…e…y… M-o-u-s-e: a Mouseketeer Memory

I was sad to read that Annette Funicello passed away. She was one of my favorites on the Mickey Mouse Club. This was an early post in Zero to Sixty in One Year, but I’m dusting it off for any old-timers out there who loved the show and the Mouseketeers the way I did. HeContinue Reading

A Small Miracle

In the spring of 1984, we bought our first house. The brick planter in front of the house was full of yellow daffodils. Every spring after that, the daffodils would reappear on their own. In October of 1991, our house burned to the ground in the Oakland  Hills firestorm. What was left   The followingContinue Reading

What Not to Wear

When my kids were much younger, we owned a cassette version of Michael Feinstein’s  Pure Imagination. (This was a long time ago!) It was a great collection of songs we all loved: Lydia the Tattooed Lady, Teddy Bear’s Picnic, Swingin’ on a Star, The Ugly Bug Ball, and the title song, from Willie Wonka andContinue Reading

An Audience with the King!

 Last summer I was invited to do a guest post for the lovely and talented Nancy Davis Kho, the music maven over at Midlife Mixtape. Thanks to Nancy, I had the chance to write about B.B King as part of her “Still in Rotation” feature. I chose to write about an album that has beenContinue Reading

Great Moments in Parenting

Parents, we’ve all had these moments, right? Right?? One day my daughter invited a friend from school over to play.  I’ll call this friend Jane, because that is her name. Jane was eight or nine–a year older than my daughter–and since her mom and I were friends, the girls had spent time together before, sometimesContinue Reading

The Sun Also Rejects: Part 4 of the Rejection Collection

I submitted this to The Sun  for their Readers Write feature. The prompt was Role Models.  Aunt Ruth used to chide me when I complained about being exhausted after chasing my young children around. “In my day,” she said, “we’d put the kids to bed—and then figure out how to save the world!” Saving theContinue Reading