Here is my two little red hearts’ worth for Valentine’s Day.

A friend of mine, whose wife has left him after 25 years of marriage, suddenly finds himself middle-aged, available, and…well, we won’t go into that. Friends, wanting to offer easy, quick palliatives, have told him to try on-line dating. Sure he’s on the rebound, and worried about his sex appeal, as we all are when we go through breakups and divorces. And all the more so when the last time you were openly on the meat market you didn’t have crow’s feet or gray hair. So let’s assume he subscribed to a free trial, browsed through profiles, maybe even sent a few messages or winks. If he’s met any ladies he’s not saying. But the other night he met a couple, through some mutual friends, who themselves “met” through match.com. That’s no big deal either; we’ve all heard those wonder-stories of couples who fall madly in love via the internet…yadda yadda yawn. Continue Reading »

No doubt some of you, my American co-residents, are moaning because it’s that time of year again, when the Tax Man (hey, I’ll get out my old vinyl copy of Revolver, maybe George Harrison can cheer me up) crooks and wiggles his ugly gnarled finger at you. He wants your miserable dollars, worthless compared to a Euro or a Swiss franc, but they still add up, however many donations you make to the Gates foundation.

But if you think April 15 is a rough date, listen to this one. And call it February 20. And don’t complain. Continue Reading »

Reader, I married him.

One of the most famous lines in English literature; a happy end to a gruesome tale of love, deception, morality, cruelty, redemption, etc. etc….you get the picture. I could almost write the blurb for the movie preview, One plain orphaned woman…one wealthy gentleman in need of a governess…

I remember the elegant, illustrated green-bound volumes on my parents’ bookshelf, a set of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights; I must have been eight or nine, and although I was intrigued by the woodcut engravings, the text was impossibly difficult for my childish brain, saturated as it was with Nancy Drew stories and other easy reading. It was the illustrations which had drawn me, but they were vaguely menacing, too adult, pictures of a world I wasn’t ready for.

Nor was I ready at age 12, when our eighth-grade English teacher set Jane Eyre as the first text of my first semester in a new school. I was still into pre-adolescent detective stories, and although Jane Eyre is a thriller in its own unique way, it was not the kind I felt drawn toward. I struggled, my grades were mediocre, I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Jane was boring, Mr. Rochester was creepy, and as for that woman in the attic…they just weren’t cool. Continue Reading »

I recently had some minor surgery on my shin that turned out to be more painful than anticipated; for two days I seriously thought I would become a Vicodin junkie. All those twinges shooting across my shin like darts; the sensation of skin tugging and pulling in places where it ought not to be. Maybe I’m a wimp, with a low pain threshold; maybe because it was worse than I thought it would be I didn’t know how to deal with the unexpected incapacitation, immobility, disfigurement. I lay doped up in bed and read Chekhov and thought about the pain he must have witnessed on a regular basis in his rounds as a country doctor—although it is mainly the psychological pain which is chronicled in his work; a world without Vicodin or anaesthesia, only vodka to numb the acute awareness pain brings of our mortal, animal humanity. Continue Reading »

Everyone’s doing it, so is that a reason to join the fray?

I hate the word. It sounds like someone having a protracted vomiting session. Blog. Microsoft Word doesn’t even recognize it as a word, and has just squiggled a red line underneath it. There are a host of tangentially unpleasant words associated with the mere sound of it: block, black, log, bleuuh, beurck—these last two being onomatopoeic renderings of the vomiting session—logorrhea—in question.

And think about the other blogs you’ve read. Some are called blogs but actually deserve to be called opinion pieces, op-eds, essays; it’s the internet delivery which slots them into the blog category. But there are also a lot of really bloggy blogs: rants, endless confessional self-indulgent journals, narcissistic contributions to the cosmic noise. Of the “A thought occurred to me as I was on my way to get the milk bottle on the stoop” school. Well, who cares about your milk bottle, and besides, no one has milk bottles delivered anymore, this is the 21st century.

Everyone is just trying to get out there, and get noticed.

So why should I join the fray? Continue Reading »