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celebrate the ordinary . . . what’s in your wallet?
Marie’s challenge to Celebrate the Ordinary reminded me of something I used to ask of my Freshman Composition students. Along with formal essays and the dreaded research paper, I required my students to keep a journal, informal “observations and speculations,” the first of which involved contemplating the contents of one’s wallet and surmising what a stranger might guess about the owner’s identity if he or she were to find it. Thankfully, this was before any of us knew very much about Suze Orman and her thoughts on untidy wallets, Women and Money. My wallet is a kind of half-way house for an assortment of business cards handed to me at long-ago conferences, crumpled…
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Uncategorized
i’m registered
The last time I was asked about a registry was about fifteen years ago, within the context of the room where my unborn child would eventually sleep. Would it be pink or blue? All things nice, sugar and spice or frogs and snails and puppy dog tails? Lumbering around Babies ‘R’ Us, the week before the birth of my daughter, I still had not registered. I could not bring myself to make a list (the way I had only ever done for Santa Claus) of presents people might buy to celebrate the arrival of a new baby. It felt demanding. More than that, if I am truthful, it felt presumptuous,…
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Greg Smith MD writes about growing up and growing older, about accepting ourselves as we are and where we are . . . today.
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sense and sensibility … and sensible hair
“Didn’t we used to call you Crystal Tipps?” Why yes, you did. Relentlessly. It was funnier to you than it was to me. Teetering on the edge of adolescence in the early seventies, I instinctively knew that Crystal’s coiffure, a big triangular purple frizz, belonged only on the BBC, in the groovy world of cut-out animation created by Hilary Hayton. Someone, probably not a feminist, had deemed more acceptable and in my case, forever elusive, that silken sheet of hair that hung straight down the backs of other girls in standard-issue blonde, brown, black or grey. Crystal, with Alistair by her side, was not cut out for corporate. Upside down, afloat…
