The Postscript

My grandmother lived to be 100 and outlived all her old friends. So she made new old friends. By the time she passed, many of her friends were closer in age to her children than to her, but she always seemed to have someone to talk to. And that is what matters.

Anyone who has tried to properly scrub their ankles while standing in a shower should save their skills and become a yoga instructor. Or a stork. It is not physically possible. There are creative ways to get one’s feet clean, but the ankles suffer in a shower. And before anyone tells me it doesn’t matter because ankles are covered by socks, I’d like to point out that this could apply to a lot of o...

Instead of sharing a house with several cats and a rotating cast of dogs and birds, Felix is the only nonhuman in our house. He plays games with Peter and gets snacks several times a day. He talks a lot and has two people who listen to whatever he has to say, even if it is just his regular announcement of when he is going to have a bowel movement—which I’m sure is newsworthy as far as he is concer...

It was not my intention to be so amusing, wearing the car wash dress. From a certain angle, it looks pretty stylish. It was some designer’s idea of a good look, and because I wear a smaller size, I can usually fit into these ill-conceived but affordable cast-offs I find on the internet. Not all of them work out. But I am delighted when I can cause some unexpected merriment simply by showing up in...

There’s a story Stephen King tells about his first novel, “Carrie,” my more frightening namesake. The novel, to hear him tell it, was in the wastebasket. (This was in the days when documents were made of real paper and went into actual wastebaskets.) His wife, Tabitha, pulled the pages out, brushed off the cigarette ashes, and read them. She thought they were good. She encouraged him to continue....

In the U.K., many folks still use stones as a measurement of weight and, while I’m not a fan of getting too much information, this seems like taking it a little too far. A stone is equal to 14 pounds. Ignoring the situation until I had added on the equivalent of a retaining wall seems like more deliberate denial than even I could manage.

There is a reason there are so many songs about going home for Christmas. Many of them are from decades past, in the heyday of movie musicals. I imagine it must have been a challenge for songwriters, sitting around a swimming pool in Los Angeles, penning lyrics about snow falling and sleigh bells ringing and Christmas trees.

Felix races to the kitchen so fast his paws spin in place for a moment before he gains traction. He purrs so loudly I can hear him from the next room, as Peter assures him this is the most tuna he has ever received. (It is exactly the same amount every night.)

There is nothing wrong with our kitchen table. It’s heavy and round and built for the outdoors, so it did not start its life expecting to be a kitchen table. That is not a serious problem. But it occupies a large percentage of our small kitchen and has awkward legs. And so (because I have a far-too-busy brain), I had been agitating about this table.

The whole thing started with Reacher, an exuberant 75-pound Belgian Malinois, and his American expat owner, Anita. The Belgian Malinois is a dog often trained for search and rescue. You might have seen videos of them scaling walls. Peter never saw Reacher actually climbing any walls, but he never doubted his ability to do so if the need arose.

I had been putting off going to the dentist. I knew I needed to get work done where my gums had receded, and the enamel no longer covered where it was supposed to. I’ve been told over-exuberant toothbrushing contributes to this condition, so I’ve been trying to ease off. But I don’t really think my toothbrush is the cause. I’m just getting old.

“There will be monks here tomorrow morning,” is what I figured Jorge was telling me. In Spanish, “monks” sounds like “monkeys” in English. But I was pretty sure we were not having monkeys over for breakfast.

I want to stop eating sweets. But then I eat one small sweet and ruin my perfect record of no sweet eating, so I might as well have a piece of cake. What does it matter? Perfect isn’t possible.

I know there are people who would say having a closet full of dresses (however beautiful and deeply discounted), is ridiculous, and buying fresh flowers is wasteful. I would say they are being unreasonable. But I suspect we are all a little unsympathetic to what others perceive as a need.

Felix was a street cat for two years before he was scooped up by his foster mothers. He was very skinny when they found him. He is black and white, with silky fur and a sly grin, and he is not at all interested in sitting on anyone’s lap. Instead, he likes to tear around the house like a maniac and play games with Peter and nibble my toes to show he cares.

I decided early on that I could not vacate to a coffee shop every time I needed to write. I don’t like wearing earplugs, and I’m not sure they would have done much good. Instead, I wrote through the noise. If I had to talk to Peter, I would go to the room he was in and stand close to him, because inter-room hollering was no longer possible (which might have been one small ancillary benefit of the...

It was late for corn, that far north. But my dad got three different kinds of seeds, and he soaked them overnight to give them a head start, and when I was visiting last spring, we stuck them in the ground and hoped for the best.

I had to get dressed to go to the gym (even if it was just downstairs). I had to put on my shoes (and we all know how hard that can be). Sometimes I had to do my exercises in front of other people. (They were not the least bit interested, but still.)

Peter didn’t know the kinds of games that cats like to play, so Felix had to train him from scratch. This has been a lot of work for Felix, but he is patient, and Peter is a remarkably good student—for starting his training at such an advanced age.

So many authors and artists I admire died very young. They made this huge splash, and their ripples are still being felt, but they didn’t live long. I like to imagine that, since I eat a lot of broccoli and don’t drink bourbon, I might squeeze out more than the expected number of years to write things and tell my stories. I like to think that the actuarial tables do not apply to me. But, of course...

It sometimes feels wicked to imagine my clothes living on someone else’s body. I imagine there are people who wouldn’t like the idea, and that’s why they buy new clothes. But I have lived in plenty of houses where other people have lived, so the idea that my clothes have had another life is not troubling.

I’ve been able to sit through all of this, almost like a normal person, just because I am reassured every minute that Janet Leigh was safe, no children were pecked by birds, and that terrible shark was, in fact, a very troublesome mechanical device named for a lawyer.

But every day on my walk, I see dogs. And this time of year—when the hydrangeas have started to turn pink around the edges and the berries are turning red on the trees—this time of year is called the dog days of summer, and I believe the dogs know it.

I’m looking forward to learning how this whole thing works. I want to see how the sausage is made. I want to see how these editors and designers and directors and marketers do what they do so well. I want to work with a whole bunch of people who know a whole lot more than I do and to keep learning. My plan is to have a good time—and to keep writing every day.

I remembered the conservative pastor’s wife who changed her name from Alice to Twyla when she discovered her birth mother. But I had no idea, after she became a widow, that she took to making corn wine or that she broke her arm when she fell off a table at the VFW.