Tomatoes were my favorite food as a child, and my attachment to them has never really gone away. I look forward to them being in season all year long, and I celebrate their appearance more than any other summer produce. Unlike many vegetables, for which I’ll have a strong preparation preference (broccoli steamed; cauliflower roasted; spinach raw) I’ll take tomatoes raw, roasted, sautéed, or sauced. It’s all (so, so) good. Tomatoes are finally teeming at markets near me, and I’m gorging in the…

Spontaneity has never been my strong suit. I’ve always admired it from afar, nodding my head approvingly at the idea of carpe diem, going with the flow, and all of that. But acknowledging its value and actually welcoming it into my life are two very different things. I know that my resistance to spontaneity has to do with my attachment to control, or the idea of it, which is something I’m trying to let go of. It’s not easy to let go of…

“Young at Heart” is a ballad that most of us have heard at least a few times; it’s ubiquitous enough to appear in movies pretty often. It happens to have been one of my grandmother’s favorite songs, and the tune she always put me to sleep with when I stayed with her. I don’t know whether she picked this song as my lullaby because she loved Frank Sinatra, or because she thought I’d like it, or simply because it was on her mind…

Toward the end of this past week, I found myself grappling with a couple of missteps—or errors, or mistakes, or whatever you’d like to call them. Small things, but substantial enough to make me feel regret. They were largely unintentional (and most of them were actually pretty impersonal, in the tune of missed deadlines), but at least two impacted other people, and I was sorry. I tried to handle the process of apologizing and moving on as gracefully as I could. One tendency…

I was chatting with a friend—a new friend, but she already feels like an old friend—a few days ago, and it became clear that we’ve visited some similar emotional and psychological territory in the last few years. “There’s so much goodness right now,” she exclaimed (and I think I’m paraphrasing a little). “But at the same time, all of this stuff is coming up that I need to reckon with.” She paused, and said, “I guess that’s life?” We laughed. I’ve been thinking…

Happy Sunday, and happy 1st of July! Summer sure is flowing along. This week, Maria Popova sent out a “mid-week pick-me-up” email linking back to a post from the Brain Pickings archive. It featured a 1958 letter from John Steinbeck to his son, Thom, who had written home from boarding school with a confession of having fallen in love with a young woman named Susan. It’s worth reading the post, and the letter, in its entirety. I’d read it the first time Maria…