Beth Kephart's Blog, page 322

One life is a miracle. One love is hope.

Last night, on the news: the Haitian husband whose wife is buried beneath the concrete rubble of a crumbled bank. Six days gone, and yet he believes she is alive. How can she be alive? Still with machines, with hands, they pull the weight of the bank away, until the husband, calling for silence, hears something stir within.

A squad of U.S. experts arrives just in time, sends water through the fissure that's been made, opens the jaws of the rubble wide enough for her to call out, Tell my...

Second Semester

So you've driven through the rain and fog and a premature dark (dusk all day, you had thought to yourself) and in the end, all you have is one final meal with your son at a nearly-empty restaurant—not the restaurant you wanted to take him to, but, it's Sunday, Martin Luther King Day weekend, and nearly everything else is closed.

And you look at his face and you know you won't be seeing it again any time real soon, or soon enough, and you think: Pay attention. Take it in. Between now and the...

Living the Zumba

Last week, I was at the gym doing Zumba when my son walked in for his own brand of workout (which involves lifting far more than he weighs, several times in a row, in several different positions, without complaining—not a talent he got from me).

"Then Mrs. G.," stopped me, he told me later, "and told me to come watch you in the Zumba class."

"She did?" I said. (Oh dear, I thought.)

"Yes," my son continued. "She said that some people do Zumba and other people live it, and that you are the livin...

The Disappeared by Kim Echlin: Thoughts

No, there wasn't time to read, but there's no not reading Kim Echlin's The Disappeared. There's no easy way to summarize this gorgeous, disturbing book, either—taut as it is, urgent, spanning decades, rubbed into with the raw horror of the Cambodian genocide yet at the same time suffused with the unbrittle beauty of a country doused in the sudden gold of late afternoon and the "uncurtaining" of a full moon on the face of a canal.

Yes, of course—this book is about love. Impossible love. About...

a thank you vlog

The Books I Bought This Week

I have a funny habit of buying books when I know—it's an unbeatable, unbearable fact—that there will be no time to read them. They sit on the chair that sits opposite my desk, their lovely perfect spines toward me. They tease, they seduce until I finally give in—slip one into my bag and take it with me, everywhere.

I steal into a page or two while waiting in the Whole Foods line. I read while warming up for Zumba. I hover over pages while on hold on conference calls. I say to my husband, ...

Take a Walk with Me

The phone rings, the stories roll in and out, the proposals ping and pong, and my son comes into my office, late.

"Hey, Mom," he says. "You know how you were asking me what one last thing I'd want to do before I leave for school?"

"Yes?" I say.

"I figured it out."

"Okay, shoot." Atlantic City, I start thinking. A day-trip into Philly. A dinner at Tango. I'll move the mountains of this schedule to make room for any of those, for he returns to school on Sunday, when my heart will break again.

"...

Dangerous Neighbors: The Cover Reveal

To say that I am honored by this profoundly (to me, and I hope to you) gorgeous cover for Dangerous Neighbors would be a supreme understatement. Laura Geringer, who bought this book for Egmont USA and edited it with a whole, sustaining heart, invited art director Neil Swaab to develop themes and possibilities. Within a few days this fabulously talented artist had created a half dozen jackets of such extraordinary quality that I longed to hang them here on my office walls. The very good peo...

Haiti

I have never been particularly good at living the gorgeous day—the forgiveness of a blue sky, the bulb of a warmer sun —when not all that far away, across an ocean, on an island, a world has disappeared, entire. Houses slid down mountainsides, families trapped in rubble, a presidential palace clobbered and chunked, tens of thousands dead, and millions homeless.

How do you live, how do you worry the everyday worries, how do you oblige the routines, when the news comes in of sudden amputees and...

And because I don't yet know what color today will be

(but one can hope)