Things go wrong, the wind changes, guitars go out of tune, coffee tastes strange; you feel it, hear it, taste it, without knowing why.



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I was dating a juggler when I met my husband; his troupe performed all over the world, a highly educated group that started out on the streets of the town where they went to college and ended up on Broadway. They were clever and witty, great partners at one of my favorite pastimes, the kind of repartee I think of as "verbal tennis." And I loved the soft, flat black leather shoes they wore on stage, shoes they got from some mysterious jugglers' supply store I never asked… Continue

Oscar and Yvette panicked when the couch caught fire and it got wedged in the front door when they tried to carry it out of the house; the February wind blew the flames up the staircase and soon, the entire house was burning. Afterwards, the fire chief told me he was surprised that the party wall between their house and ours had contained the blaze. “If the paint starts to blister, call 911,” he said. I spent the rest of the night staring at the party wall, waiting for the… Continue

There’s sexy, and then there’s scary sexy—she was scary sexy, and the funny thing is, I don’t think she knew it, with her creamy farm girl skin and her long blonde hair and the big bluesy voice that seemed more knowing than was possible for someone so young, for a country girl who had just come to the big city. She lived downstairs from me, in an apartment carved from the first floor of an old three story house.

Late one night, the woman…

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New York real estate is tough and if the building hadn’t caught fire, it would have been much harder to break the lease—the lease on the apartment I had been sharing with my high school best friend, who had moved to Boston, leaving me with an apartment I could not afford on my own. Continue

“You’re going to screw up,” my boss said, when he gave me my first big promotion. “Everybody does. The most important thing is that when you do, you tell me. I can protect you if I know; I can’t protect you if I don’t know.”

Permission to make honest mistakes—priceless.

I would have walked through fire for that man until the day he died.

Anger is a red rubber ball.

It’s thrown at you, you throw it back and you’re in the game. Stand still, it bounces off you, and you’re still in the game; there are very few ways off the field.

I learned this lesson when I was very young, awakened in the middle of the night, two, even three times a week by the lights in my bedroom, turned on suddenly by…

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The tall, slender woman all in black with the shaved head, the nosebleed heels and the laser-cut cheekbones-- why is she boarding the morning commuter train carrying a giant red velvet sombrero covered with gold embroidery? She’s way too old for show and tell, there’s not a child in sight and anyhow, it’s August. The woman walking down the midtown street is carrying a cake, and not just any cake, it towers three tiers tall, robed in silken chocolate fondant, abstract two-dimensional flowers in… Continue

The Abbot of a Zen Buddhist Monastery;

A beautiful blonde labor historian, cigar clenched in her teeth;

A fiddler, dancing in her garden, heels together, three feet off the ground;

A graduate student who once was a juggler. Twenty five years on the road got it out of his system, now he counts micro-organisms in pond water.…

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"When did your body betray you?"

Three women walk through the crowd, long dresses whispering around their legs, breathing these words in the ears of people they select seemingly at random. At the time, the answer was easy--"Not yet." Today, my answer is different. Age is inevitable, it's not betrayal.