“I am not now, nor have I ever been…” If you grew up in the 1950s, as I did in a lefty American family, the name Joseph McCarthy elicited as much loathing as that of…
Posts published in “Essays”
My condo building is peopled for the most part by liberal Baby Boomers interested in the world around them, and on a recent balmy afternoon a group of us sat chatting as neighbors do at…
Try whistling a few bars of the Star-Spangled Banner in downtown Kabul if you want to find out how effective a national anthem is at making enemies. A less deadly outbreak of red-flag-waving hymnody made…
Riding downtown to Seattle on the #99 bus, I seated myself behind two 30-something women speaking Swahili or something, and their young kids in strollers. Behind me sat a white or lightly ethnic man, folded…
When I was a little girl more than 40 years ago, I thought fish were slimy, yucky, disgusting things. An opinion that I held for a long time, punctuated only with a tolerance for poached…
Like most of us you probably spend a fair amount of time each month compiling lists of your spouse’s mental and physical deteriorations. Is everyone familiar with the term “conservatorship”? Some guy at the Forest…
It's a lovely day at Seattle’s ominous urban transit center, where drunks loiter and preachers preach; where litter blows in the wind, last week's vomit lies dried on the concrete until the rains come, and…
Most travelers can recount airplane “flights from Hell.” But of course, there are also Satanic cab and bus rides. Sometimes, even a pleasant-looking ferry will stray across the River Styx. Taxi terror, for me, will…
I always had the crazy notion that I would live forever, but now, as I quickly reach the age of 50 and my body finds it increasingly necessary to fail me, it is most likely…