The Pandora app turns your car into a time machine. The app lets you create your own radio station. You don’t have to waddle through the swamp of static and asinine talk show hosts to get to the music your mood demands. Pandora gives you Promethean control over the fire of music. You type a song or an artist’s name and your subconscious hankering births, through the company’s guarded top-secret algorithm, your own playlist-world! You then fine-tune this playlist with your Caesar-thumb: thumbs down sends the song to the lions, thumbs up blesses a song to propagate. Put that self-generated music playlist in the perfect sound room, your car – a moving aural capsule shutting out the noises of the world and leaving the clamors of the world in its rearview mirror – and now music is your all-encompassing environment, a microworld speeding past trees, highway exits, road signs, traffic lights, undone chores and even regrets. Add music’s power to conjure decades two bars … [Read more...]

“Go outside. Look up. Secret of life.” – Anne Lamott My wife and I are raising our children only about 30 miles from where I grew up. As I write from my desk overlooking the street, there’s an epic game of hide-and-seek taking place outside a neighbor’s townhome. I catch glimpses of my two boys, darting and dashing, laughing with abandon. Wasn’t it just yesterday they were in diapers playing peekaboo on my lap? Now the slanting afternoon light shines a halo on their heads, as I remember being a teenager escaping into the dark night. ❈   ❈   ❈ Looking back, my elementary school years seem like a long recess: climbing blooming dogwoods in spring; leaping into piles of copper leaves in fall; chasing fireflies in summer; building snowmen in winter; and always sports, changing seasons from football to basketball to baseball and back. My best friend lived down the street. He’d knock on the front door and I would race him down the steps, two-by-two, and into the green grass to throw … [Read more...]

Garfield Street, Washington, D.C. My mother is standing in the doorway of her bedroom. Then she turns to the bureau to fold socks. She has them divided by color, so all she needs to do is match them up, pair them. It’s clear she likes this task, something to accomplish and check off the list she stores in her head. But this is not actually happening right now. Not in the real world. It’s just that I want it to be. I want to be able to tell her about Emma and Garland, my children, her grandchildren she never met. Many of the things my mother loved I also love. It works that way, like osmosis. She took stock of what I saw and felt. She curated it. In her sitting room, where all important decisions were made, she taught me that in England cattails are called bullrushes. That a pangram is a sentence containing every letter in the language: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. I don’t remember what my father looked like except from photographs. But I can provide details about … [Read more...]