In November 2009, my Italian grandmother died after suffering a bad fall in her apartment from which she never recovered. Because she lived in Italy and I lived in the United States, I didn’t get to see her often, but we were extremely close due to my many visits to Italy and her intermittent visits to the U.S….
Category: Family
10 Things I Think I Think on July 26, 2025
It’s the dog days of summer. Hot as fuck. Can barely move. No energy for a preamble. Let’s just get into it. 1. Death keeps rearing its ugly head. One of my upstairs neighbors died last week. He was one of two brothers who lived together as roommates. Don’t really know the history there. Apparently…
10 Things I Think I Think on June 8, 2025
I’m just back from an overnight trip to Saratoga Springs with M. I took her to see her favorite band, Glass Animals, at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, which is located in the middle of this huge state park just outside of Saratoga Springs. Absolutely beautiful and a wonderful place to see a show. I’m…
2024 Wrapped
This will be my last post of 2024, so it’s a good time to take stock of the year that was for me. I think I’ll make this a regular thing at the end of each year like Spotify does. My Theme for 2024: Transition Every book has a theme–sometimes more than one–and so it…
The Style Issue
I sometimes forget that not every post has to be introspective and existential. It’s okay to lighten things up and not be so damn serious all the time. In that spirit, I’ve been toying with writing about style and what good style means to me for a while now. I’ve been interested in style, and…
10 Things I Think I Think on August 4, 2024
It’s August, the peak of my Hot Boy Summer. Last summer, I went on an Italian adventure that was accompanied by a Fool’s errand. This hot and sticky summer has been all about a return to Self and a restoration of clarity and balance in my life. Virgos need both to be happy, so this…
You Can Always Go Home Again
I just returned from a week-long vacation in New Hampshire with M. I hadn’t been home in at least two years, maybe longer. It feels strange calling New Hampshire “home” because I haven’t lived there full-time since 1992. But New Hampshire IS home to me and always will be. Why is that? Why do I…
The Unreliable Narrator
Every reader begins a story in good faith, suspending disbelief and accepting the narrator’s portrayal of events at face value. The reader’s understanding is limited to what the narrator chooses to disclose and the narrator’s subjective feelings about the story’s characters and their encounters. There’s no reason for the reader to doubt what the narrator…
My Dearest M.
I found this today while going through old notebooks and journals of mine. I’m retyping it here in case it gets lost or destroyed. Paper is so unreliable. I wrote this on the airplane two days after you were born, when I was on my way to see you and hold you and breathe the…
Photophile
“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.”– Dorothea Lange “You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”– Joan Miro When I was 9 or 10,…