Category: Parents

A mystical mama monologue, blue heron sightings, pie in the sky

2/28/2026

Mama, it’s your birthday, which means it’s nearly spring, which means exodus and green buds and Queen Esther, stories of war, deception and peace. I hated the dressing up for Purim as a kid—I never understood the assignment. We made a lot of noise and learned vague lessons about good and evil, and later, my father explained to me quite carefully that there was really no such thing as good and evil—only consequences. Which hurt my little baby philosophical heart.

Mama, because it’s your birthday, I wish I could buy you the perfect burger from Wendy’s but you were always so picky about what they put on it, and even if it wasn’t the burger, you’d berate anyone who made you a sandwich for getting it wrong, and when you died, I looked up at the Sarasota sky and thought, that’s a perfect sun, and that’s a perfect cloud, and I thought, you’d love to eat the sun-cloud as a perfect sandwich.

Mama, I’m not sure what these words are coming out directed at you. It’s the last day of a monthlong assignment I gave myself to write daily and see what finds me. It’s you—asking for my attention, yet again.

OK, I’ll tell you about the last few days with you on earth. Your three girls walked through a park in the Amish part of town and saw a blue heron shimmering in a patch of sunlight in the river. So astounded were we by the heron’s beauty that Nina’s yellow amber beads broke and scattered everywhere like shooting stars. We laughed, we cried searching for them but never found them all. I’m sure there’s still a bead or two hidden like golden eggs in that park.

Mama, you taught us how to talk to strangers and so we talked to the ladies in their bonnets playing shuffleboard that day in the Sarasota heat. I never knew the Amish ladies from Indiana pooled money for the long bus rides south for the winter, snow birds. They denounced technology but made an exception for an engine that could pluck them from a winter of despair in the Midwest. It was fun to chat it up with them but then again, I knew you were dying and felt distracted.

Mama, when you sent me out for pies, I decided to do a story on them, the history of a famous Amish pie shop in Florida. I ate a lot of pie—for research. Key lime, French silk, apple. I met the lady who married into the tradition, and she was on mission to convince me that a marriage was forever and so was her devotion to a life of pies. They made thousands a week—and I wrote about this with the attention of a surgeon while you were making your cosmic transition. We got so many free slices, and I know you winked at me for that.

Mama, how silly to think I keep on writing into the void of a motherless future. It took me a while after you slipped out of here to realize that I wished you loved me, but not you-you, more like, a mother-you, universal-mother-love-you. I’m glad you came to me through the psychic medium to shake your hips and talk about your porcelain dolls and tell me you were healed and whole in out there in the heavens of your flea-market dreams.

Mama, I hear you in my head sometimes. “Mand,” “I don’t think so,” “Get out of here!” “Over my dead body.” Ha! You loved to say that. Now that you’re dead, I still try to not to make you mad, and hope you’re feeling proud of the way the three of us have figured out how to live our lives without you. It’s easier than we thought because we know you’re still here—just out there—real busy—on a long ride—hunting for a bargain or a treasure or a slice of pie out there in the clear, blue skies.

Transit Slips, #28

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On sea blessings, word worship and finding prayer in poetry

2/15/2026

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Over the last few years, I've gone to many estate sales across Chicago's North Shore in search of remnants of its collective Jewish past. At one home, a while ago now, I picked up a tiny white book of prayers, blessings and hymns. I love the portable pocket size of this book. The inscription reads, “Presented to Mr. and Mrs. Mandel,” by North Suburban Synagogue Beth El, Highland Park, Illinois, on the occasion of their new membership, Friday, November 17, 1967, signed by the rabbi.

I grew up around many of these prayers and recognized the familiar blessings over bread, fire and wine, ones I recited as a kid. But I was surprised to find unfamiliar blessings over special occasions including:

On seeing a rainbow; At first sight of an ocean or sea; On hearing sad tidings; On eating any fruit for the first time in season; On entering into possession of a new house; On purchasing new dishes; On witnessing lightning; On beholding a falling star, lofty mountains, or vast deserts; On hearing thunder or storms; On smelling fragrant wood or bark; On putting on a new garment.

My father collected leaves until his final days. He kept them in a binder, each glorious leaf protected within a plastic pocket. Every once in a while, he’d point out a particular stunner and well up with tears. His favorites were the fiery yellow fans of the Ginko tree in the autumn. There may not have been a blessing in specifically for fall leaves, but my father felt moved to worship them as worthy of our undivided attention.

Word worship is another kind of wonder we practiced at home, all kinds of word games and puzzles to play as a treat before sleep each night. My father, the English teacher, urged us to think up every homonym and homophone under the sun. Name every word that began with the prefix "tran" or the suffix, "ly," and keep going like we were counting sheep. I remember how the blue pocket thesaurus, its own kind of book of blessings and prayer! It's wild, the way a page can begin with collusion and end with command or revenge and reward.

So many words for mourn and inquire but none feel quite right. I memorized poems in school as long as I wasn’t told to for an assignment.

When I was too young to doubt myself as a poet and walked around telling people I was one, I got a job teaching poetry in public schools. One of my favorite lessons was to ask a room full of kids to stay as quiet as possible for as long as possible up to 30 seconds, and then, as soon as the silence broke, to immediately pick up a pen or pencil and write down everything they heard, felt, saw, and remembered. The result were spectacular—one boy wrote about swimming in the ocean in the rain as a form of “double swimming.”

They’d gone fishing in the silence and plucked out words to make their poems feel like prayer.

Transit Slips, #15

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Transit slips, an explanation

2/1/2026

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On this full moon in Leo, in the year 2026, on Sunday, February 1, in Skokie, Illinois, I return to my own website with intention to tend to this writing garden here as much as I am anywhere else. There's been so much debate and conversation around who owns our words depending on where we put them, and I've decided that while I try out these other platforms, I also want to let some of my ramblings and fragments land here, as I'm full of things to say and the courage to say them at this juncture, and want to honor this surge of encouragement!

I'm calling these fragments "transit slips," to indicate the transitory nature of these writings and how they're emerging on the page. I read all morning and take notes. I let what I read lead me through the corridors of my mind and imagination. I gather up the notes and shape them into transmissions that feel like poetry with a narrative promise. I don't imagine anyone will find me here unless I point you in this direction and for now, that feels fine. Whoever may finds these words is a friend to me and these attempts at connection. Here's my first transmission in the series; I'll try to write one a day in February.

Why do the dying sometimes fear thieves among them? My mother believed I stole her gold bracelets at the nursing home in Sarasota. The police tracked me down to investigate. I had to prove I was her daughter who had taken the gold bracelets for safekeeping.

The problem was that I’d come all the way from Zanzibar and realized only once I was back on American soil that I lacked any form of current identification—a fugitive of sorts, escaping one life for another. My driver’s license had expired, my passport had expired; I was a daughter without documentation, accused of theft. Eventually, my name was cleared, but perhaps only due to the doubt others cast on the stories of the dying. I still have a Florida number from this time, from when I was trying to dial up a trusted identity to meet the demands of the moment.

Eight years later, I was the daughter who lived with her father as he was dying and helped him die. This was a more cosmic assignment between a lapsed poet and a lifetime jazz pianist, an alliance quite friendly to the philosophical porch musings that accompany such circumstances. That whole summer, we riffed as I tended to my toes with imperfect pedicures, my father sitting in the sunlight with crystalline questions about divine purpose and the inevitability of what unfolded—his unfolding. Like a true improvisational artist, his exit was gentle yet dramatic, like the final note he always struck at the end of each song.

This reminds me of a question I ask myself often: how did I end up staying so long at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Delhi in my early thirties? Well, I was drawn to mysticism and the wistful adventure of the spiritual sort. I also thought this money-saving move would give my sister and me more freedom to dash around the old city in search of silver, temples, and chai.

We ended up twice in the labyrinth of the wedding market. Unlucky in love, we purchased stacks of elaborate green envelopes with arched doorways for flaps. And then, of course, we paid for tickets to enter the pigeon hospital, where Jain devotees dedicated their days to healing sick birds. I took photos of magnificent yellow marigolds in heaps out front, but these images were lost to time.

At night, when we returned to our room in the ashram, it was so cold we climbed inside our sleeping bags and slept in layers of all we’d packed, including our pink wool socks. A portrait of “The Mother” hung above our heads, next to a list of her commandments, among them being “No gossip.” It was too cold not to gossip, and so we kept ourselves warm with one story after another about other people’s flaws until we’d started a fire in our minds.

Ask me anything about failure, folded notes, ancient alphabets, elder care, diplomacy, and porch pedicures. Ask me anything about writing when it doesn’t matter anymore, returning to live in your childhood home, taking sandwich orders from an angry dying person; clarifying one’s henna design desires to a disgruntled artist on her ninth client of the afternoon; apologizing for one’s inadvertent colonial tendencies while traveling—for example, asking for ice. I attempted to tread lightly, but I know I left muddy footprints wherever I once walked. Ask me anything about traveling without an itinerary or enough money for a return flight home. Ask me about coming home.

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travel far now

A mystical mama monologue, blue heron sightings, pie in the sky

On sea blessings, word worship and finding prayer in poetry

Transit slips, an explanation

Field Notes

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