it was the hour I spent volunteering on a committee at City Hall this morning. San Francisco’s City Hall is one of the most beautiful civic buildings in the world. Walking to the meeting was a stroll across white marble floors and gorgeous staircases and lobbies, passing women in bridal gowns and girls in quinceañera dresses who go there to have their pictures taken.
Category: Uncategorized
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I never realized that until I saw Trump and his followers trying to destroy it.
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…than a beautiful day in October.
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Once, many years ago, I had the terrible experience of hopping on a plane for a flight and discovering I had no books, no magazines, nothing to read. How this happened, I don’t know, but it happened. This was in the era before movies were widely available during flights and after the time when stewardesses could offer you magazines along with snacks and sodas.
“This is so sad,” Michael said when glanced over and saw me picking through anything I could find in the seat back pocket.
My father had a similar experience, told me about once rushing to make a long flight and grabbing the first paperback he saw in the airport convenience store. He was forced to read an entire Danielle Steele novel. “My God,” was all he would say about it afterwards, shaking his head.
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…isn’t over yet.
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Daily writing promptWhat are the most important things needed to live a good life?
…too heavy with possible meanings. Does “good” mean happy? Useful? Important? Does “life” mean your span of days, or how you spend those days, or how you are remembered, or what you have loved or hated or what you have changed, what you have made better or worse?
I don’t know. Sometimes that is the only correct answer.
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with my husband.
We’ve reached that uneasy age where, when one of us gets a call from our doctor or pharmacy, the other is likely to ask, a little sharply, “what was that about?” after the call ends.
Aside from that it’s a pleasure and we’re very lucky to have found each other.
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Spending decades writing stories and trying to get them published requires the conviction that you have something worthwhile to say, and the diamond-hard ego that goes with it. Never wanted to be anybody else. Never wanted to look like anybody else (unless you count my 30-something self as opposed to my 60-something self when I look in the mirror these days.) Always liked my name.
The one time I considered changing it was when I got married, and considered taking my husband’s last name. I decided against it becuase A) the paperwork was a pain and B) I would have had same name as a popular porn actress.
So I’m very resistant to changing my name, but if I had to, if dark forces were pursuing me and my life depended on living underground with an alias, I’d likely choose something completely innocuous and unmemorable, with a last name that didn’t fall too late in the alphabet.
And I certainly wouldn’t share it here.
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I do have a lost chocolate bar. In my childhood, they were marketed and packaged by Nabisco, chocolate covered with a peanut butter filling. They were called “Ideal Bars.” Even back then they were oddly hard to find, only occasionally appearing on supermarket store shelves. I think the last time I actually bought a package was in college. After that they vanished.
A Google search today brings up a protein bar. It’s not the same. It needs that old cheesy Nabisco packaging.
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It’s hard to name my favorite, but I think it must have been Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, which I encountered after A Little Princess. The slightly oversweet taste of A Little Princess‘ heroine was dispelled when I read a character’s decription of the The Secret Garden’s protagonist — “A more marred-looking young one I never saw in my life.”
Mary Lennox is the anti-Sara Crewe. Sara’s hair is rich, brown and abundant. Mary ‘s hair is yellow and sparse. Sara is beautiful. Mary is ugly. Sara is almost preturnaturally sweet and loving throughout the book. Mary is, in the beginning at least, an ill-tempered, entitled little racist. In short, Mary is a far more believable orphaned scion of the white presence in English-occupied India than Sara Crewe could ever be.
Obviously, I was not aware of that when I first read it. I just knew, as much as I loved A Little Princess, Mary Lennox and Misselthwaite manor were more interesting to me. So, I frequently returned to the book. When I reread it in my teens, then my twenties, it revealed even more. Adult readers are likely to speculate that, once puberty hits, Mary Lennox’s close friendship with her sickly cousin Colin and the pan-like country boy Dickon is likely to become a bit complicated.
Which is why at least one filmed adaptation includes a coda set many years later, and a sequel, Back to the Secret Garden, takes place during WWII. In both, Dickon is absent and Mary is either engaged or married to Colin — which makes sense. As a working class country boy in the first decade of the 20th century, poor Dickon has WWI cannon fodder written all over him.
Pam Troy 