Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

I was telling Tom about the time from my childhood when my mother ordered me to go play outside immediately. "But Mom," I whined. "I want to finish my drawing." I was in the middle of a Georges Seurat  pointillism phase and had been busily hammering a piece of paper with colored pencils. I recall this very distinctly. Mom shrugged and put her hands in the air like she just didn't care. Next thing I knew I was out on the front porch with my sketchpad and no pencils staring at the door. Click. "That was a very strange thing for an Art major to do to her kid," said Tom. "What'd she suggest you do instead? Go find your brother and dress him up in a leotard?" My brother, dressed in a leotard. Maybe, I mused. Either that or spend a pleasant afternoon brawling with the boys up the street, which is how I spent half my childhood. My mother was completely unconcerned that they had BB guns and all we had were these ghetto guns my Po...

I dread the day when my niece and nephews do not fall for the “smell my feet” game, no matter how cleverly deployed. To be clear, my personal strategy lacks finesse. I find a kid on the floor and exclaim, “Oh look, Jack wants to smell my feet.” Then I count on the existential fact that I’m bigger than he is. Tom, on the other hand, premeditates. When we were down in Richmond, he told Jack and Ella to lay on the carpet, head-to-head, face down. He told them to close their eyes and lift their chins. Then he shimmied between them, his giant feet just under nose-high. ha ha. smell my feet. The crowd went wild. The Dark Game will also be mourned even though playing it can get tiring after about six hours. It’s basically the love child of hide-and-go-seek and your basic game of tag: Just played inside, after dark, with all the lights turned off. The rules are starting to get really complicated. Recently we added a “shake the water bottle full of dice” element, which is the indoor ...

Jack texted me a selfie My nephew Jackson is a fast learner. He was in Grammy's hospice room for 8 seconds before he figures out there's a "Nourishment Center" down the hall featuring a fridge stocked with chemically-preserved snacks his mother has forbidden. In a flash, he's back with an orange jello cup.  Jack walks in Grammy's door and instantly gets a random nose bleed. A real gusher. Blood all over his face, dripping on the floor. He sticks five fingers up his nose. It is not even moderately effective. Nonetheless, the kid maintains a vice grip on the jello. We snap into action with nostril-sized wads of kleenexes. Luckily, there are lots of readily available kleenexes in a hospice facility.  Eventually, the crisis dwindles to a trickle. Jack celebrates by jamming his entire bloody hand into the jello cup and shoveling a blob into his maw. We all sit back on our heels and screech at the same time. Uncle Tom says, "You are a sticky jello...

At 100 years young, Grammy T died on December 24, 2015 after a fall in her home. Earlier, she had been outside gardening and clearing yard clippings with her wheelbarrow.  Grammy and me and my bro walking a 5k - she won the 90+ age group. Grammy was a "Rosie the Riveter" during WWII. Here's her version of events, I'd transcribed it for her big birthday party last spring: I worked at Armstrong’s Cork Company. It turned into an armor factory. I first worked riveting lights onto the wingtips of B-29s. That was shift work. I worked 11-7, 7-3, 3-11. When I was riveting, I had to wear pants because I had to crawl into the airplane wing. That was really when women started wearing pants. There was no uniform. You had to buy your own slacks. Most everyone wore dark blue denim-like clothes. We all wore the same kind of outfit because there really wasn’t much else to buy. There were shortages and maybe there was only one brand of women’s pants. Women had n...