Category: My Family Matters (To Me)

  • Once upon a time, New Year’s Eve 1945

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, January 4, 2015 My mother and father met at a New Year’s Eve party in Paris 1945, at the end of World War II, at the Pierre Hotel in Paris. She, the 24-year-old eldest of three girls who had been working to help support her family for eight years already, was on…

  • Stuff

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, November 9, 2014 It’s 1963 and we’ve started acquiring stuff, antiques mostly, because my father is newly infatuated and obsessed. A Pennsylvania boy by birth, he has unexpectedly made a French girl into a war bride and adopted a new country, replete with mind-blowing food, rich history and beautiful objects (which have…

  • Hot blood in the summertime

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, June 22, 2014 It’s 1971. Summer is so inconceivably, relentlessly simple. Once the last bell of the last class rings, and the middle-school warzone, temporarily peace-treatied, recedes from view, a mental movie screen begins at once to unfurl, to slowly reveal the simple title of this particular movie, in 4,000 pt…

  • April pings

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, April 6, 2014 We are driving along Mountain Village Boulevard one blustery day, Celine is about 10, when she screams, “Mom! Stop the car!”I pull over.There’s virtually no one on the road. The sky is that ridiculous blue, and stretched-out clouds scud by like pages of a book, ripped and let…

  • Tryptophanatic

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, March 31, 2013 Shortly after my father is fired from Boeing in the early ‘70s along with half the rest of the workforce, he decides not to go back to work but stay at home instead, much to my mother’s great and lip-pursing chagrin. It’s a big enough house not to…

  • Crucible year

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, January 20, 2013 Here’s a theory (I made it up): The theory is that every person has a crucible year, a year during which certain key elements come together and alchemize from the soft-ish stuff of undigested life into a brand new compound, a hard bright crystalline nugget through which all…