June 12, 2025 Birthday Cake Start with a clean house.OK, well, if not clean exactly,Your messes discreetly set aside.Company ready. Flour the floor,Inadvertently, as youFlour the cake pans,7 of them,To make, as requestedChocolate and strawberry. Old champagne in the fridge,Was it leftover from Easter?Flat for weeks,Like so many things left around the housePast their prime,You failed to discard it...
June 6, 2025 I don’t recall exactly the circumstances in which I began telling my son: “We can learn how to do hard things!” It became a mantra during Covid, when I was, unwillingly, his sub Pre-K teacher when the world went virtual overnight. We—mostly I—would say it repeatedly, almost chanting, to push back the protests that inevitably erupted when asked to do something...
June 3, 2025 There’s a scene in Gossip Girl, a show I greatly enjoyed while living in New York City during and after law school as a mental break from all that law—and which made me, in its portrayal of the emotional and relational challenges of my city’s super wealthy, grateful for my ordinary life, and in full disclosure, a show which I’m enjoying again years later, watching through a second...