Unrolling the map of yourself a little farther — Paris in the summer is hot and not really built for heat. Air-conditioning is rare, as is ice, and the only cold things we regularly experience are the looks from Parisians after confirming their suspicions that we are Americans. Still, even sweaty this city earns its reputation as beautiful and…

There’s something really special about a bad bath; and other things — I have had the stomach flu, and the stomach flu has had terrible timing. It came during my busiest work week — the first full week of teaching — of the year. Without getting into the nitty-gritty here, let me say that I have taken on more than I can…

Why stumbling upon something meant something — Here are some moments from before the iPhone: Due to a train strike I have ended up in Luxembourg. I have no friends, no connections, no map of the place. I meet a Canadian who is about my age at a youth hostel. We decide to go to a discotheque…

Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell’s New Book, Skirts, Points Out the Folly of Wearing Jeans — I have very few opinions about fashion, and almost all of them only pertain to strippers. So, I was pretty excited when my fashion historian friend, Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, agreed with my boldest style pronouncement: Jeans are a plague upon humanity. Kimberly’s new book, Skirts: Fashioning Modern Femininity in the Twentieth…

When someone close dies and you’re far away — All the rushing around death used to make no sense to me. Seems like the last thing you’d want to do is anything. But I get it now. The busyness, the bookings, the bustle, it all keeps you acting and not thinking. When you stop for a minute, it hits…

Forced to sell my baseball cards when I was broke, I missed out on a lot of money — but learned some valuable lessons — To answer the question posed in the title: it sucks. No shock there, I suppose. And no, I’m not exaggerating. If I still had the baseball card collection I possessed 30 years ago, I would be able to auction it for around half a million dollars today. I thought about…

I landed my first book contract in the middle of the hardest year of my life — I asked a friend how she was doing the other day. She told me, honestly, that professionally things had never been so good; personally, they were brutal. I’ve had essentially the same sort of year. Last August, my father fell and broke his hip and suddenly my long-distance care coordination…

How jigsaw puzzles presented the big picture. I did not like doing jigsaw puzzles. My husband did. Early in our marriage we discovered our irreconcilable differences and avoided the subject. But, as is the case of many marriages, the arrival of children changed things. Without discussion or warning, my husband…