When I start to get overwhelmed and anxious, I have found that stepping out of my overscheduled life for a “haiku walk” can rewire my day. Traditionally, Japanese haiku walks are called gingkos, named after the tree, and are held in a place of historical or cultural significance or in an area of natural beauty. I live in Moscow, Russia,…
One summer when I was a teenager, my mother was nervous about a cousin’s impending visit. Pam had become a vegetarian and my mother had no idea how to cook for her. How would she get any protein? My mother was deeply worried. My father, who loved hamburgers and steak, was much calmer. “Tolstoy and Gandhi were vegetarians, and Thoreau…
When my mother’s father died, she was only two years old. She had a few early memories of him, and in her last days she told me again how her father had given her a ball with red stripes on it, and how she remembered him smoking and coughing, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. She remembered…
Just over a year ago, my 82-year-old mother was rushed to a hospital where they discovered that she had metastatic cancer. I flew from Moscow to Los Angeles and stayed with her until the end of her life, driving around the San Fernando Valley in my rental car, a midnight blue Hyundai Elantra. It is ironic that as an L.A.…
