Category: My Family Matters (To Me)

  • How to build a house (part 1)

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, July 10, 2016 At eight years of age, my best friend is a little girl named Minnie who lives not too far from our house on the shores of Lake Washington, in Seattle, a friend with whom I spend the majority of my days, outside, making stuff up. We make up a…

  • Acts of rebellion

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, October 4, 2015 I am standing on floor 26 of 666 Fifth Avenue circa 1982 in a corner office that belongs to my boss, a middle-aged woman who has pulled herself up from the secretarial pool to VP status in one of the largest publishing houses in Manhattan. She is out to lunch…

  • Our elders, ourselves

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, August 23, 2015 Thirty minutes until my workday begins and I am on Main Street sneaking in a late bi-monthly transatlantic call to my aunt Michelle — who, at 90, is the undisputed matriarch of the family. I am about to receive a bit of a tongue lashing from her, which I…

  • Balancing acts

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, July 26, 2015 On our street, growing up in Seattle in the ’60s and ’70s, the big old houses are still filled with Catholic, Presbyterian and Mormon families, so there’s nothing really special about five or six kids at a time having the same last name. During the summers — for a brief,…

  • Seminal. Summer. Vacation.

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, July 12, 2015 By the time I turn 11, half of our household has left — one for school, one to get married and one to join the Air Force — and I’m all alone with my mother and father in the four-story, 5,000 square foot house I still dream about, perched above…

  • Life hacks 501

    published in the Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, February 1, 2015   I have a life hack of my own, something I will share with you in a moment. For those of you who don’t know, a life hack is a solution to an everyday problem — a gizmo, a workaround, a MacGyver, a light bulb on…