A Plate of Pandemic
Creativity in Times of Crisis
Martha was born in 1928 to Portuguese immigrants and learned to speak English in the public schools in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Her brothers served in the military. Her sisters became teachers, then mothers. Martha married at twenty. At twenty-one she
I wasn’t sure what the word “crisis” meant, but as I was a child who cried easily, I suspected it had something to do with tears. And “cried easily” was, if anything, an understatement. It happened at least once a
When I was a curious five year old, I asked my Dad what he did when he went to work each day. He replied that once in his office at the university, he drank a magic potion that made him
It is two weeks past Christmas. I’m sitting in my Honda, one of at least thirty vehicles in a four-block long line inching toward a common destination: the big blue Goodwill bins. Cars swerve past us, and someone lays on
dedication: To my wonderful girls, Sundance and Buttercup, who both died in 2022 and whom we miss enormously… and to all our spectacularly unique and fantastic furry loved ones. Normally I took my dogs to my sister’s house on
“Are you okay?” I was not, as it turns out, attacked by a bear. And neither was Bob, my husband. We were not kidnapped from our camper. We were happily off the grid in Chaco Culture National Park in
In 1997, I pestered my parents to let me use the VCR to record a cheesy movie called Asteroid. People think Deep Impact and Armageddon are the granddaddies of space rock disaster movies, but this piece of crap beat both
It had been hours since I moved. Sitting on an exercise ball—something I had read online (or maybe interpreted from something I skimmed online) that helps your core and your posture, but honestly it just felt better than