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From Summering
“I don’t do summer.”
I was tired and grumpy, and even the cool of my favorite around-the-corner-from-work-with-a-faculty-discount bistro was not up to the task of lifting my spirits. read more
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Blog New York
Benevolent Contagion
January 24, 2018
Before today, I had not posted on my website since the day of my older son, Ike’s, death, now more than a year ago. I had found comfort for months in the photo of him and in the words of W. S. Merwin and Agnes Martin that had reached me that day. read more
Thanksgiving
November 23, 20163 comments
During these months in North Carolina with Ike, he is the steady focus of my days. Now 33, his undiagnosed degenerative illness has shaped his life, and ours, now for 19 years.
Tags: Agnes Martin, beauty, caregivers, death, happiness, hospice, Ike Levy, Isaac Robert Levy, life, Psalm 143, thanksgiving, undiagnosed illness, W.S. Merwin
A Firm Persuasion
November 3, 2014
Saturday, November 1, 2014, at Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital’s Art Ability, several hundred art lovers interested in works created by individuals with physical and cognitive challenges had the opportunity to view the work of Charles Blackwell read more
Tags: art, art and medicine, ArtAbility, blind, Bryn Mawr Rehab, Charles Blackwell, improv, intellectual disabilities, jazz, Melanie Vi Levy, poet, Robynn Takayama, traumatic brain injury, William Blake
On Her Plate
October 8, 20143 comments
“Let me tell you what’s on my plate.”
It’s Mom on the phone, from her hospital bed in NC to me at my desk in NJ, and I think, Ah, she wants to talk about her upcoming pacemaker procedure. read more
Tags: Aging, Atul Gawande, Families, Healthcare, Kezar Lake, Medicine, mothers, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Sarah Manguso, Two Kinds of Decay
sheen of stoma, pith of summer, and a sky grown clear
June 6, 2014
MoMA’s sculpture garden has Isa Genzken’s 28-foot rose and the New York Botanical Garden, (May through September) “Great American Gardens of the Early 20th Century read more
Tags: Eavan Boland, Edna St. Vincent Millay, gardens, Isa Genzken, Museum of Modern Art, New York Botanical Garden, Ruth Stone, summer, women
Crocuses, UConn, and Derek Jeter
April 12, 20141 comment
Typically around this time of year crocuses incite a gasp of delight, and they did again this year — just a few days ago in the backyard of the rented house to which I moved a few months ago and the next day, more robust ones, read more
Tags: amazement, baseball, basketball, Breanna Stewart, Derek Jeter, essays, Floyd Skloot, form, heroes, hybrid form, lyric essays, New School, nonfiction, Peter Cooley, poetry, sports, standards, UConn women's basketball, writing
Stillness, Nothing-Happening Moments
April 10, 2014
In March at a beach in North Carolina, a group of people I have known for a long time gathered read more
Tags: Akhil Sharma, Burning Down the House, Charles Baxter, experience, Family Life, fiction, Kawabata, memory, Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, senses, stillness, writing
Onset of Spring?
February 1, 2014
Most of this post — Robin Robertson’s poem, the photographs taken in November in Frenchtown, NJ — was compiled in a moment of late November pause, read more
Tags: Calendars, family, February 1, Festivals, Frenchtown, Gaelic, Gerald Stern, holidays, Imbolc, NJ, North Carolina, poetry, Robin Robertson, Samhain, Spring, winter