This story involves two rodents if you count opossums as rodents which they aren’t; they’re marsupials.   That they are related to kangaroos doesn’t make me love them.  They still look like giant rats. I found the aforementioned opossum, dead, under my apple tree on the morning I was leaving for a long weekend at a  Read the Rest…

During the warm weather, my cats come and go as they please.  They prefer doorman services, but they have cat doors: one from the house into the sun room and another from the sunroom to the outdoors.  I sometimes prop a house door open to spare them the onerous inconvenience of pushing through two flaps.   Read the Rest…

In our culture we hear a lot about performance.  Sexual performance, teacher performance, athletic performance, dramatic performance.  The word sets my teeth on edge because I think it’s misappropriated.   I used to get up to sing, swim through all the perspiration, let my eyes glaze over so as to avoid seeing the audience, and  Read the Rest…

I had a long time student with the prescient name of Deborah Singer.   When she first started lessons she told me she had always wanted to sing, but she didn’t have a lot of confidence —not at all an unusual occurrence, particularly with singers who have actual ability.  She didn’t want to sing classical music  Read the Rest…

My Vanity Fair came the other day, looking more bloated than usual.  The articles are exceptionally well written.  There’s usually one really juicy one that’s worth the price of the subscription.  But I really hate the inserts, the thick advertisement pages, the fold out pages and the way the table of contents is 25 pages  Read the Rest…

Every year I have a yard sale where I attempt to get rid of the year’s accumulation of capitalist effluvia.  Since I have lots of storage space, I have merchandise still in stock from years’ past as well as much of the stuff that didn’t sell in my mother’s estate sale 3 years ago. One  Read the Rest…

I always knew that one day one of my cats would pee on the Great Books: that ponderous, pretentiously leather –bound set from Encyclopedia Britannica which my parents bought in the 1960’s.    The exclusively male writers, chosen by Mortimer J Adler, include Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Plutarch, Aquinas, Newton, Kant, James, Darwin.  There are 52  Read the Rest…

I live in a rabbit warren of a house in Seattle, Washington.  My backyard borders a small private cemetery.  When I first moved in, I put a gate in my back fence so I could slip into my own private park and walk around whenever I wanted to.  I love my quiet neighbors.  I’ve twice  Read the Rest…