sweetheart redux

my favorite of our old Olympia houses.  I like to see it through the eyes of Google Maps.  It's that little gray thing hiding behind trees with a billboard on its lawn. When I was 18 through 22, I lived in Olympia, Washington.  I’d moved there ostensibly to attend The Evergreen State College, but my true reason was the town itself, which was the starting place and still-center for the punk community I’d read so much about since my early teens.  I only applied to one other college, which was prestigious and at which I was accepted.  With  Evergreen State College, I bombarded them with several fine points and essays in my application, and received an early notice of acceptance as well as a full-tuition freshman year scholarship, which I won based on my work on the zines I’d written throughout Junior High and High school, and my extracurricular activity of being in a punk band that played in a few L.A. venues.  There are so many stories that ...

I have a few boxes I keep hidden away in the closet even thought they're full of beloved treasures -- this is because, while I love these treasures, I wouldn't have the concentration to think if I lived in a house where all these things were not kept in boxes.  Instead of thinking of them as being hidden away in a closet, I try to think of them as being kept in treasure boxes.  Over the weekend I had to delve into a couple of these boxes while looking for a photo album I really needed, and here, I have selected a few unearthed treasures to share: My grandpa gave this to me and my husband the day before our wedding -- i may be a little confused but i think it's a commemorative George Gershwin envelope that he sent to Gershwin's son to have signed.  These are a couple pages from a full diary my mom bought me at a flea market when i was a teenager.  It is  "Line A Day" diary -- its title page says "copyrighted 1892, by samuel ward company, Boss, MA...

Everyone I’ve ever spoken to about the movie Wizard of Oz feels like they own it to some degree, like it is an artifact from only their own childhood.   For my own part, when I was a kid, the Wizard of Oz used to air on network TV once a year and it used to happen near my birthday, so it was a birthday tradition for me, my mom and her two best friends named Bill (Young Bill and Old Bill) to watch it together on TV as part of my birthday celebration.   This is a particularly poignant memory for me because I loved both Bills, and one I haven’t seen in years and am unable to track down on the internet, and the other one died of cancer in my mom’s house a few years ago, and also, of course my mom and I can't regain the closeness we used to have when I was young enough to get excited over the big deal a network station (I forget which one) made about showing Wizard of Oz.   So this memory of watching Wizard of Oz with them every year is one of those painful poignant stabb...

Tender revisionist history inspired by my mom, whose life was ruined by The Beatles.

Here is Children's Verse, first published Autumn 1998.  Jesus but that was a cold season, obviously.  I misspell Cemetery in here, which is funny because I ended up working in a cemetery for a couple years shortly after  graduating college, and I misspelled it for awhile even when I worked at one.  Enjoy.  or, I mean, enjoy? xoxo robin