We’d booked ourselves into a cheap hotel after a lavish country club wedding reception. Our newish Honda stood out in a lot full of dented cars, rusted vans, worn trucks and trailers. From a crowded parking space near the inn’s rear door, we skittered inside, avoiding the gaze of two young guys in a parked car as we clasped our possessions to our bosoms. Three doors down the unwashed hallway stood our smoke-free, well-kept room for the night, and we were grateful.

A little kid at my school assembly grinned up at me after the show. ‘You remind me of somebody I know!’ he chirped. ‘Who?’ asked I. ‘My Gramma!’

It wasn’t the first time my internal chronometer got a jolt of sudden aging. My dad’s friend told me one day I looked more and more like Frieda, my paternal grandmother he’d known as a child.

All this grandma talk can get a girl cranky in the bones.

Why do recognized leaders of the GOP use gun and violence metaphors in reference to political opponents in their tweets and bites?

‘Let’s start getting Nancy [Pelosi] ready for the firing line this November.’
Michael Steele, Republican National Committee

In a world where Mars, Inc. spends tens of millions on cocoa research for the commercially coddled (i.e. those of us who can afford both health and sweet indulgence), let us pause to consider the lives and loves of two Emmas.

‘What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.’
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield

Sometimes an image calls out for words. For a sculptor, a painter, a photographer, it could be the other way around.

Following the filigree of Facebook, fingers on keys like soles on a gallery floor, I come to this photo and catch myself longing. The caption offers no clues about sculptor or setting, only this:

WELCOME TO 2010

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