Again, with the musty old essays! I wrote this one three or four years ago and just rediscovered it last week. da·cha (däch) n. A Russian country house or villa. For years, I have wanted my very own dacha. Maybe there’s something about dying empires that stirs longing. In September of 1991, I boarded a…
Opening Statements: A Real-Life Murder Mystery The State’s chief attorney, an intense young woman with porcelain features, takes the stage, startling us out of our torpor. She paces and gesticulates emphatically, as if to communicate her moral outrage: the defendant, she insists, has shot an unarmed man who begged for his life in his final…
Last spring I posted about Hal’s and my harebrained “Let’s get in shape real fast” scheme, buttressed by a 60-day DVD workout plan called “Insanity.” And insane it was: six days a week, for forty to sixty minutes a day last April and May, we slid a disc into the computer and bounced, heaved, and…
Nobody wants to do it. I certainly didn’t, especially after enduring the first few hours of jury selection, a process (called “voir dire“) which is so insistently repetitive, so oppressively tedious as to produce a powerful narcotic effect in us trapped, helpless potential jurors awaiting the resumption of our lives. I actually heard someone say,…
Why studying languages makes your brain a better organ.
A feature by Abby Ellin in this month’s issue of Psychology Today got me thinking about success, and how we measure it. Click here to read an excerpt from the article: “I Coulda Been a Contender,” a reported piece with elements of personal essay, about how so many of us feel we haven’t lived up…
Check out the first installment of my new monthly column for Her Nashville – a profile of Christie Andrews, who started a Nashville nonprofit dedicated to advocating for kids with learning disabilities, regardless of their families’ income. Learning Matters, Inc. helps kids who are falling behind in school (and their families) navigate the educational system and…
Although a lot of folks I know seemed (and seem) to know exactly what they’re doing as they navigate their way through the immediate post-collegiate years, I certainly did not. For me, the early twenties were rather painful and uncertain years, fraught with my own insecurities and confusion about how to plot a course through…
The Greenery 