In the last two weeks I’ve been called self-satisfied, low-class, controlling, shallow, sexist, smug, priggish, crazed, repulsive, creepy, trashy, frivolous, provincial, disgusting, and just plain horrible. My crime? I pierced my six-month-old daughter’s ears at the request of my Nicaraguan husband, an experience I wrote about for the nytimes.com‘s “Townies” column. It was fun to…
New York
My Lost Saints
Today is Saint Anna’s day. You may know her as Jesus’s grandma, as Anna and Joachim were the parents of Mary. Anna is not a flashy saint. She’s no Mary Magdalene (hubba hubba!) or John the Baptist. But for people named Anna, she’s a patron saint. And there may be others who choose her as their…
The Time of My Life
On Wednesdays the City of Miami Beach screens a movie on the wall of the Frank Gehry-designed New World Symphony Building, and, depending on what the flick is, my husband and I join hundreds of other Miami Beach residents in the park opposite the building to watch it. This Wednesday’s had been on our calendar…
Almost Mother’s Day
Mother’s Day is a good day to be pregnant. I would like to think that sounds poetic, like the first line of Leonard Cohen’s poem, Days of Kindness, which begins, “Greece is a good place/to look at the moon, isn’t it?” But I fear it just sounds simplistic. Yeah, mother’s day celebrates moms and…
Betwixt and Between
Last Saturday was one of five Saturdays of Souls in the Orthodox Church–days that are set aside to pray for and remember the deceased. I love the idea of having days dedicated to thinking about and communing with loved ones who have passed on to a world beyond this one. It reminds me of a…