Wednesday, December 31, 2014

We went to the supermarket for the first time in a long time today. A real old-fashioned supermarket down the hill, not the cramped, overpriced one near us. We learned all over again how to navigate the cart around people, how to read the aisle signs, how to tear off the plastic produce bags. Lemons, Cheerios and toilet paper. We could get anything we wanted.

Sunday, December 28, 2014

We scrambled onto the train, the weary parents with their little kid. I got on first with Jackie, listing against me the way kids do, and bobbing her head around. She careened dangerously close to the pole, the seat, surfaces surely contaminated with New York City filth.

“Don’t let her put her face on anything,” Sara called out across the car.

I sat down with Jackie and noticed a guy next to me, a young guy, writing something in a notebook. I read over his shoulder.

“Don’t let her put her face on anything,” he wrote.

Tuesday, December 23, 2014


I’ve had too many dreams about work lately. Not quite nightmares, just dreams where I’m doing what I do at work except there’s a layer or two of dreamy abstraction, like I do it by hand, not on the computer, and my pen turns into a telephone and I have to operate the telephone in order to place a mark on the paper.