HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY. If you are someone who has pushed another human out of your body and managed to keep it alive, kudos to you! I’ve never given much thought to this holiday, because of all the made-up holidays it seems fairly innocuous. If you happen to have a mother who is alive and likes…
Category: Grandma
Your Unauthorized Biography
When we die, each one of us leaves behind an archive. How much control do we have over that material once we have shuffled off this mortal coil? This week, SIFF is doing a limited run of the new documentary on the life of Kurt Cobain, Montage of Heck. This is the first “authorized” documentary, in that…
Demolition
On Saturday, they tore down the house where I grew up. It was never “my house,” but rather always “grandma’s house,” until she died in 1983. I really only lived there full time for six years, and even during those years I stayed with my mom most weekends. Still, those years are the only years…
I’ll Walk, Thanks
On hot summer days in Coeur d’Alene during my childhood, I walked to the beach barefoot. It was about six blocks from my grandparents’ house. First I had to get across the packed dirt and gravel driveway where grandpa parked his excavating equipment. Then there was a short section of unpaved road on Lost Avenue,…
Quantified Love
Over the past couple of years I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, writing, talking, and…er…quantifying about the Quantified Self (QS). Last October I gave a talk at the QS global conference in San Francisco. In May I will be attending my third QS conference in Amsterdam. While delving into QS is related to my work,…
The End of the Story… Or Is It?
In grandma’s 1942 diary, she added a note on February 6, 1944. Up til the first part of June this book might as well not be — the 1st part just disgusts me — then came June — Zip — The Chicken Coop + good times + August + Zip again — I loved him — (maybe…
A love story with missing pieces
This week I received the final batch of letters from Zip to my grandma, all the way up to August, 1945. It’s been heart-wrenching to read them. They’re not so much love letters as they are loneliness and longing letters. Zip wasn’t one for the “mushy stuff” as grandma complained in one of her diary…
Thirty Years
Thirty years ago today, life as I knew it ended. The last night of my childhood was frosty and silent. A deep cold that settled into bones. Today I sat down and read grandma’s final diary: October 9 – November 28, 1983. It’s the same as all of her diaries, an accounting of comings and…
Letters from Zip
I admit it, when I got a packet of photocopied letters from my grandma’s first love on my birthday last weekend, I was a bit giddy. I’ve been transcribing grandma’s diary from 1942, and thereby living through the terrible longing for Zip… for letters from Zip… for anything Zip. I felt like — FINALLY —…
Plumb Wonderful 