Do the Extra Thing

My son Graham loves the bus. Specifically, he loves taking a variety of SEPTA’s Philadelphia city buses around the Roxborough neighborhood where we live, and to various points of interest across the city. He’s gotten adept at reading numbers and…

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Climbing the Ladder

Yesterday’s main elements for me – outside of a slow sloggy day at work that ultimately proved productive but took some real effort at self-motivation – combined plum-picking and a devastating migraine that sent me to bed early. It’s unusual,…

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Home Depot Away from Home

My father adored Home Depot. And Lowes. Perhaps more accurately, he always loved exactly one of them at a time, and whichever one it was alternated based on where he’d gotten especially favorable or unfavorable service last. He would be…

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It’s the Heart that Matters More

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen Counting Crows. It’s definitely the most I’ve seen any band and definitely more than ten shows, but beyond that, things get hazy. I could 100% rebuild an accurate count and while…

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Bed by Day

In winter I get up at night And dress by yellow candle-light. In summer, quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day. -Robert Louis Stevenson, Bed in Summer I’ve had debilitating migraines since I was ten…

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Picking Plums

I am really sorry for what I have just done I know that I could have tried more but it was really fun -A poem I wrote in English class in 1995, after This is Just to Say (William Carlos…

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Forgive, Don’t Forget

Hey baby, do you ask yourself sometimes what you need to be forgiven? Everything that you’ve ever done wrong is the reason that I’m driven straight to you… -Counting Crows, High Life I have trouble with forgetting. Or, better put,…

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Call Your Mother

It’s not that I didn’t used to call my mother. I called my mother all the time. We would talk for five minutes, or ten or even twenty. And then she would hand the phone over to my dad. And…

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In the Land of Make-Believe

The imagination of children is a powerful yet perplexing phenomenon. Those who’ve spent any significant time with kids, or even who remember their own childhood well, can speak to the extensive creative ability of society’s youngest members. And in raising…

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Wistful Wisteria

When I was a young child in Visalia, in California’s Central Valley, we had a wisteria vine growing in the side yard. It would grow uncontrollably in spring and summer, sprouting thin green tendrils seemingly overnight and looping them around…

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