The Taco Chip Wars

Sometime before 1960, at Disneyland in California, a restaurant called Casa de Fritos bought stale tortilla chips from a local vendor and spiced them up for a second life. They became so popular that Frito-Lay eventually bought them and “Doritos” were born. Doritos are the food equivalent of crack.  They don’t really taste good. They…

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Ain’t No Mountain High Enough

Was Sisyphus a happy man? In a 1940s essay called The Myth of Sisyphus, author Albert Camus considered the case of a guy condemned by the gods (oh those gods, peppy as all get-out!) to roll a boulder up a hill to the very top – only to have the boulder roll back down to…

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A Lifelong Conversation

It’s almost my 25th anniversary. For all these years, through many up’s and some harrowingly steep down’s, the marriage everyone thought would fail, has endured. When we got married, my husband and I had known each other two months. I was widowed: He’d never even come close to being engaged. I was older. He never…

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Freedom

I’m going away tomorrow to write. This used to be an occasion of huge trauma for my family. When the children were younger, they really minded my not being there. Despite the fact that my husband is a great dad, he is a dad … and your dad is not your mother. Now, they are…

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Battle with Words

In her novel Beautiful World, Where Are You, the stunningly talented Sally Rooney wrote, “On the back walls of the house and through the branches of the trees, through the colored leaves of the trees and through the damp green grasses, the light of dawn was sifting. Summer morning. Cold clear water cupped in the…

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No Passions

No one in my family is musical. Even the one person who used to be an actor, while he could sing, wasn’t really “musical,” in the sense that he could go to a party and sit down at a piano and pick out tunes that everyone knew. I think of this lack not only as…

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Wisdom Given to Me on My Wedding Day

If you don’t pick up his socks, some other woman will No matter what he says, never disagree with him  Always ask him before you paint the wall/buy the suitcase/make the meal If you want to be happy, never bring up your job or how much you like it Never let him see you without…

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Slinky

When a cat walks into a room I am in, the cat sees me clearly, right away. The cat narrows its cold, expressive eyes and, says to me, with its mind, “The others might not, but I see you for what you are.” Cats think of you this way: Are you warm when I am…

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In Praise of Toast

What can you say about a person whose favorite food is toast? I actually never met a potato I didn’t like either … but if I could only have one thing from now until the end of time, it would be peanut butter toast. On rye, please. Toast may not be exciting but it is…

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No One Ever Compared Me to a Summer’s Day

I like to be snowed in. It doesn’t happen much anymore because I don’t live in the frozen Midwest anymore, where we once woke up on a frigid morning to find that the front porch had fallen off the house. Even though they’re teenagers now, my younger kids still yearn to wake to that pure,…

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