Monthly Archives: September 2017

I am in my car, returning from a doctor’s appointment. It is no longer rush hour but I have been waiting through two cycles of a traffic light. I remember reading that the American Automobile Association calculated that a car burns a quarter-gallon of … Continue reading →

The isolated shouting starts around one in the morning, the young men’s beer-drunk voices booming, the women’s higher-pitched and scratching, bouncing off the windows and bricks and mortar of the buildings that makes this two-block street a modern canyon. This … Continue reading →

I have a treasure box. I’d more or less forgotten about it, mostly because there is nothing of real value there. It’s filled with an assortment of small stuff I’ve collected willy-nilly (do, people still use that term? I was told recently … Continue reading →

When I moved, the old and often-painted wood desk I’d owned and worked on since the mid-80s fell apart. It had never been designed for anything heavier than a pen-wielding hand on a piece of paper, and when the moving … Continue reading →

A couple of years ago, a man I knew slightly and who’d heard of my bouts with cancer asked me, “What kind of cancer would you prefer to have?” I answered, “Ovarian.” It took a couple of seconds for it … Continue reading →

I first wrote this 15 years ago. My father, Jean Octave Sagnier, died on September 8, 22 years ago. He was a good wise man who without being secretive rarely talked about himself. He was an architectural student working as the … Continue reading →

I once wrote an article about elevators for a now defunct magazine. The story was, of course, titled Shaft, and I visited some of the more ornate elevators in the city. I spoke to a few surviving elevator operators, those … Continue reading →

Today, because the stars did not align properly and circumstances demanded it, I found myself telling a close friend that her mom had died in California the night before. It was not a sudden death. Her mom had been on … Continue reading →