Living Above the Fold

When I was a kid, my grandmother delighted in telling us about the ghost that haunted her childhood home back in Germany. Every night, she said, the family heard mysterious rattling on the staircase from dusk to dawn. I never really believed her—and, from the way she told it, she didn’t really believe in that ghost, either—but it made a great spooky story. And ever since then, in the back of my mind, I always hoped that someday I’d meet a ghost for myself. Because, well, you never know.

You Never Know (The East Bay Monthly, January 1 2010)

You can’t visit Iceland without going to the Icelandic Penis Museum.

The rest of the country is nice too—pristine volcanic tundra, stunning iceberg seas, boiling thermal hotpots—but the real reason tourists come, even when they won’t admit it, is to giggle and titter at this basement gallery, where every variety of animal phallus is on display, neatly jarred and labeled like fruit preserves. So when I spent the holidays with family in the capital of Reykjavik in 2002, I knew that I had to see it for myself.

Members Only (The East Bay Monthly, June 2008)

This is a holiday essay I wrote about the last Christmas that I spent with my grandmother, Oma. This is a pretty personal topic for me and quite a bit unlike most of the other posts I’ve made on this site so far.  I don’t think there’s much that I can say about this that won’t be clear from the piece itself.  I only hope that it gives you some small idea of what an amazing woman my grandmother was,

Oma (The East Bay Monthly, December 2008)