Posts by Geraldine Birch
More San Francisco Musings
Since breakfast at the hotel seemed exorbitant, we walked across the street to Lorie’s Diner—a retro-type restaurant with the hood of a 1950s car sticking out of one of the walls. The café sported a long counter, waiters and waitresses dressed in garb like the 50’s, each wearing a red soda jerk paper-pointed hat and…
Read MoreSan Francisco Insights
Visiting San Francisco has always brought up comparisons in my mind with Los Angeles, where I grew up. It felt richer in history, which, of course, it is. Every time I visited SF, I detected a vibe that was different from my hometown: There seemed to be a heartbeat in the Fog City missing in…
Read MoreThe Perfect Nursery
In those beginning days of motherhood, I would rush to the crib, pick him up, and try to soothe him. He seemed startled and not even the warm breast would calm him. I would rock him, not understanding his cry, and that is when I first heard it.
Read MoreA Look Backward
Maybe it was my training as a newspaper reporter, or maybe because I had been raised by my family to watch my surroundings, but as I got out of my car, I noticed two men loitering around the men’s rest room. I made a fast track to the women’s bathroom and when I came out, one was still there, but the other had moved to the van.
Read MoreA Great Read!
When We Were Young and Brave by Hazel Gaynor is the kind of book that transports the reader to a a different time and place–a welcome change of scenery for those of us who are staying close to home during this pandemic. In this factual historical novel, the place is Chefoo, Shantung Province, China. and…
Read MoreThe Banyan Tree
Lahaina Town’s monstrous one-hundred-seventy-year-old banyan tree covers a whole block across from the harbor. One can sit on a bench under the tree’s spread and see the harbor twinkling through its branches, but it’s the banyan that commands the eye, not the water. The tree’s many trunks (16) reach deep into the island’s soil wherever…
Read MoreA Bag of Charcoal
There I stood, a beauty to behold in my worn pink chenille robe, my hair rolled up in curlers, and my eight months of pregnancy bulging beyond the robe’s width. That spring evening almost fifty years ago, I was exhausted, cranky, and ready to climb into bed with my already sleeping husband, when the doorbell…
Read MoreOn Deadline
Darkness enveloped the lone gas station that stood on a rural road surrounded by open fields. I slowed down to take a better look, but I knew I had no choice. This was the only place for miles where there would be a telephone booth. I was on deadline, having just left an important school…
Read MoreLove your Enemies per Leo Tolstoy (in the time of Coronavirus?)
It is a mistake to think that there are times when you can safely address a person without love. You can work with objects without love–cutting wood, baking bricks, making iron–but you cannot work with people without love. In the same way as you cannot work with bees without being cautious, you cannot work with…
Read MoreSilent Reason
She isn’t pretty. Her face is angular in an odd way reminding you of a triangle; her stomach swollen, stretched to its limit. She looks uncomfortable, ungainly even, yet she doesn’t seem inhibited by her pregnancy, climbing about as she does, nimbly moving from leaf to leaf. A few weeks ago, when you spied her…
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