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Thanksgiving 2025, a Holiday Meal in Two Parts

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We celebrated Thanksgiving a bit differently this year. J’s work schedule on Thursday made it difficult to prepare a traditional meal in one day. I also wanted to enjoy cooking without rushing, so we spread the meal over two days. On Thanksgiving Day, we had what I called “the appetizer course” — small, comforting dishes that didn’t require hours in the kitchen. The rest of the feast was saved for Friday, when I was more relaxed and could cook at my own pace. When dinner was ready, I set the table with dishes my ancestors used. I placed the roasted chicken, bright orange squash, and gravy in bowls and platters that once belonged to my maternal grandmother, Geri Schmieman. Our dinner plates came from my maternal great-grandmother, Margaret Wayer. They were shipped to me last year by a cousin, who carefully wrapped them for shipping. They had sat in her attic for decades. We used them for the first time tonight. As far as anyone knows, they haven’t been used in over fifty years. That’s a...
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The Perch Protest, or Woman vs. Dove

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Yesterday evening, I decided it was time to bite the bullet and make the necessary change. With the solemn resolve of a parent trying to get their kid to eat spinach, I carried the wooden branch into my studio. It was long past time to swap out the metal perch my white-winged dove, Oliver, was accustomed to. For too long, he had sat upon it for hours, a gleaming runway that did absolutely nothing but encourage his nails to grow into impressive scimitars. A single nail-trimming by the vet a couple of months ago had been traumatic for both of us. We needed a better, more natural solution. So I selected a wooden branch from the garden — sturdy, honest, pleasingly irregular. During Oliver’s Free Flight time in my studio, I installed it with care. Oliver was horrified and refused to fly back into his cage when playtime was over. I had to chase him while he did loop-de-loops around my head. Once he finally landed on my office chair, I caught him and put him in his cage. Not an optimal way to...
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From the body's perspective, 50 is not the new 30. And that's just fine.

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Inspired by Theresa MacPhail ’s article “ You Should Act Your Age – at Least When It Comes to Exercise” ( The Guardian , Nov 3, 2025) Read the original article → Yesterday, I read an article about exercise and aging  by Theresa MacPhail in The Guardian . Her main point was that we need to adjust our exercise routines and be more realistic about our exercise goals and our body's abilities in general as we grow older. Specifically, she points out that older people should increase resistance training to about 60% of their workouts, reduce cardio to 40%, and overall be gentler on their bodies. MacPhail calls out the fallacy of “ 50 is the new 30 ,” which I’d already come to see as a myth, yet still had been carrying in the back of my mind. I often compared current self to the image of my thirty-year-old self and blamed any slowdown on laziness. The article encouraged me to shift that thinking. I'm working on it. MacPhail shared several anecdotes about older adults who'd...
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A Drinking Life by Pete Hamill

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Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life is both a personal memoir and a portrait of a time and place. Growing up in an Irish immigrant family in 1930s Brooklyn, Hamill captures the texture of daily life in a city shaped by hardship, resilience, and community. The book moves beyond the story of one man’s struggle with alcohol to offer a wider glimpse of American urban life across the Depression, wartime, and postwar years. What makes the memoir so compelling is Hamill’s candor. He recounts choices and episodes he is not proud of with a reporter’s clarity, never dressing them up but never excusing them either. That unflinching honesty makes his eventual break with alcohol feel earned rather than dramatized, an epiphany grounded in the rhythms of real life. The prose is straightforward yet evocative, drawing the reader into both the intimate details of Hamill’s coming-of-age and the broader sweep of history. In the end, A Drinking Life is not only the story of one man’s reckoning but also a reminde...
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I Still Love America. That's Why I'm Writing This: what I've seen from afar, and why I haven't stopped caring

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(photo taken on my trip to NY, May 2022) The most stunning book I’ve read in a long time is the one I’m reading now: Defying Hitler , a memoir by Sebastian Haffner. He was born in Germany in 1907, and the book—written in 1939 but unpublished until 2000—covers the years from his birth through 1933, just as Hitler came to power. It traces the rise of Nazism in Germany from the perspective of an ordinary German, offering a rare and immediate eyewitness account. Haffner wasn’t a politician or a historian; he was simply someone who paid attention. And as I read, I can’t help but draw parallels between the rise of fascism in Germany and the political events in the U.S. I find myself checking off boxes. Yes, that’s already happened. Yes, that too. I want to go back and build a timeline, to place the events Haffner describes alongside what has unfolded in the United States over the past decade. This isn’t a subject I usually write about, but I feel compelled, not just to share my thoughts, bu...
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A 57th Birthday

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(first published, July 20, 2019) The woman, holding a guitar and wearing a long flowing skirt, dolled up with flowers in her hair and a big smile, approaches the man holding the Percheron, a large draft horse. "¿Okay? Está bien? Is this okay?" she asks. She'd made the arrangement the previous week and so she was there to keep her promise to herself and to the man holding the horse. It was her 57th birthday, and the first one since her dad had passed, two months ago.   At first she told herself that she wouldn't celebrate it, that she was too sad, that she was in mourning. But then she thought, "What would Dad want me to do?" And she knew the answer: to enjoy life and to live it to the fullest. So then she thought, "What's the most outrageous thing I could do on my birthday?" And this is what she decided: to get dressed up, go into town with her guitar, and have her photo taken with the guitar while riding the Percheron. At this time in her life...
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Taking the Plunge at Sixty-Three

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  When I read about how Annie Edson Taylor had gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel on her 63rd birthday, I felt a flash of recognition. Like Annie, I’ve been marking my birthdays with some kind of personal challenge. In her case, she took her leap into the roaring unknown in 1901, trying to secure fame and a financial future for herself. At sixty-three, I too am going to leap. I started this practice a few years back. One year, it was a photo shoot: me in a long black dress, holding my guitar on top of a massive draft horse. It was just two months after my dad died. It was a challenge because I had considered not celebrating my birthday at all—but then I realized that my dad would have wanted me to. So I did it in his honor. The morning of my birthday, I got dressed up, walked into town, made that image, and celebrated with a shot of tequila reposado afterwards (and then I had to rush off to perform in the restaurant). I didn’t know it then, but that would be the last year I playe...
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