Each time I see this painting, I remember writing an entire short essay sitting on our patio, while Natalie napped in her stroller next to me. I had observed behavior in a bathroom line at a movie theater that had disturbed me. Writing about it not only helped me get the “sinking feeling” off my chest, it helped me understand why I was so disturbed. The essay ended up being published in the Los Angeles Times. Today, I discovered the essay is still on-line and reading it made me realize that one of reasons I write is to cope with the world. I wrote this essay 17 years ago. A…
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My Tapestry of Words
“Use your words.” Thoughts struggle for translation, hover just out of reach, waiting, waiting for realization—a musical note balanced on the horizon, ready to take flight. The gentle nudge, a summer’s breeze. “Use your words.” Growing and shifting, they may have stumbled, leaves tumbling from trees, but the words came. They always did, each time my mother or father encouraged me as a young child to find them, to gather them and release them tenderly from my grasp. Language flutters against the kitchen curtains, flows from room to room, glowing on the walls and dancing delicately in the air, settling into the shelves between books like golden dust. I remember…
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Sherlock Holmes Meets the Amazing Mary Russell
I met mystery author Laurie R. King during the production of Mysterious California, my parents’ 2008 documentary. Now, five years later, I have discovered Ms. King’s wonderful Mary Russell series. The Beekeeper’s Apprentice begins the series with 15-year-old Mary Russell meeting the retired Sherlock Holmes in 1915. The two immediately become a team. Mary Russell is inquisitive, clever, and recently orphaned; Holmes is in desperate need of a mind equal to his in logic and deduction. Soon, they are travelling across England, first to solve the mysterious illness of a wealthy neighbor, then on the trail of a kidnapper, and finally to solve their most difficult case of all, one that…
