Brown Eyes

Spring, 1980 I was twenty years old, working at a frame shop in downtown Dallas. I lived alone in a trailer, in a field beside a freeway.  I was saving my money to go to art school in Philadelphia in the fall. Through a friend of a friend, I met Laura Hanley. Laura had just come home from Brown University. She was a thin girl of medium height, with short, wavy brown hair. I never had a photo of her, but she looked like astronomer Bethany Cobb. Laura had a quiet grace. She’d studied at the Providence Zen Center so I talked to her about the ideas I’d gotten from Alan Watts. I developed a huge crush on Laura instantly, and plotted to see her as often as I could. One spring day before the awful heat, I went to White Rock Lake with my usual gang of friends. Laura arrived with a handsome, bearded young man, and I didn’t know if he was her boyfriend or not. She wore a summer shift, printed with Van Gogh drawings. I went crazy inside wit

By the time you get to be my age it's like you're having breakfast every fifteen minutes. —  Kitty Carlisle Hart Three of us, Tilden Park, December . Hello again. I hope life was good to you in 2009. Weren't we cleaning up from New Year's Day, just a few weeks ago?  The major events in our family this year: Max began Kindergarten and Japanese Saturday school, we took a vacation, I got laid off and got a new job right away. We can't ask for better luck than this. So why am I so exhausted?  We are well. Max is much bigger, more difficult, and more interesting to be with. Recently he said to me, " I’m too busy to be even talking to you! Please don’t bother me!" Shades of our future. In truth, Max is a busy boy. He goes to school six days a week, five to English Kindergarten and once to study Japanese on Saturday. He already has homework almost every night, to which he submits gracefully, for a little boy. Family life has been compared to runnin