It was my father’s chair, a brown corduroy recliner that sat in front of the big, white tiled fireplace.  The older he got, the worse his Parkinson’s disease,  the harder it became for him to rise from that chair.   I think it was the only place in the house he was truly comfortable, perhaps the only place in a world that had changed so much since he was born in Russia, before the Revolution, since his family vanished  in the Holocaust.  

He must have missed it, after my mother put…

Ben moved to San Francisco thirty years ago and really, we were never that close to begin with.   But he found me on Facebook and I recognized his name immediately when the Friend Request popped up.

I’ll always think of him as a banjo player, but these days he’s a photo journalist.  He posts pictures on Facebook and I wish I saw the world through his eyes.   I would never have noticed the chrome-yellow box emblazoned with the red scorpion, much less photographed it,  framed by the…

It looked like a sunset on a stormy night, an ominous deep purple streaked with angry red.  Cheerful garnet toenails added a surreal touch of Hollywood glamour to toes dark as thunderheads.  My first impulse was to scrub them clean but soap and nailbrush can’t touch blackened blood dried under swollen skin.      

Three weeks later, the sunset has faded.   I should have photographed it right after I broke it, when it still looked like a special effect, like a prop in a zombie movie. …

Sometimes, sleep wraps itself around me like a beloved friend, and seamlessly, today becomes tomorrow.     Sometimes, it teases,  dancing just out of reach. 

When my husband calls, sleep runs to him like a dog,  loyal and loving.  For me, sleep is a cat, willful and wild.  Chase a cat and she runs away. Sit still and she approaches, purring in your arms when you least expect it. 

In my dreams, bears amble through green woods, sandy blond and mahogany brown, wild and beautiful.

Last month, we traveled to Alaska, hoping for bears, seeing them only  as furry   brown pebbles glimpsed through binoculars.   Waking,  I think, these are the bears I hoped for in Alaska.    But for the first time in my life, I go to a website that…

Film cost money, developing film cost more.  When we were young and wild, we also were chronically broke and disinclined to spend our scarce funds on photographs when so many other options beckoned.  As a result, interesting though they were, my earlier years are largely undocumented.  

How different from the lives of my younger relatives who have come of age in the era of digital photography, every moment captured and  cast into the electronic ocean to be shared with…