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Showing posts from March, 2015

I Thought There'd Be More Lunches

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I’ve met a lot of people in the 2½ years I’ve lived in LA, and one of the best of the lot was Karen. We met at a writer’s workshop put on by our mutual friend Vicki Abelson a couple of years ago. Each month, Karen and I were part of a group of women gathered around Vicki’s dining table to read aloud and gently critique each other’s work. Karen had presence. Her readings were performances that drew you in. She was engaging. She always had a smile and a twinkle in her eye. I secretly coveted her thick, lustrous, long hair, because mine is fine and is scraggly if I try to grow it out.   Karen and I had a bit of a mutual admiration. We genuinely loved what the other was writing. I couldn’t wait each month to hear the next chapter in Karen’s story of the years she lived in France as a child. Because we both were writing about our families, we felt a little bit like we knew each other’s kin. “How are Anna and Paul?” I’d ask, when I wanted to know how Karen’s memoir was prog...

Requiem for Three Cats

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The three white, plastic boxes were nestled into a larger brown, cardboard box labeled “office” with a black Sharpie and stacked among hundreds of other cartons in a moving van, along with more than two decades worth of furniture, household goods, and memories. Why, I wondered, was I moving the ashes of three dead cats halfway across the country? DaisyBelle Riley, Mose and DaisyBelle left us one by one over a span of three years. I always thought we’d gather the kids and ceremoniously scatter their ashes beneath the branches of a towering evergreen just beyond the backyard fence. We’d say a few somber yet loving words, recall their idiosyncrasies, and retell the stories of how our feline companions first came into our home.  But life intervened. It seemed as if the family was rarely all together anymore and, although I thought about it frequently, I never quite planned the memorial service.  We moved West and the ashes of three Kansas cats sat in a closet in Los...