Beth Kephart's Blog, page 329

Hiroshima in the Morning

[image error] Yesterday Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, a good and wise friend, wrote to say that Hiroshima in the Morning: A Memory, will be published by the Feminist Press in September 2010 in the big book fall of their 40th anniversary year.

Hiroshima is Reiko's book, a book about being a daughter, a mother, and a wife during an almost year of travel. In 2001, Reiko, a New Yorker who had grown up in Hawaii, spent eight months in Japan interviewing the survivors of atomic bombings. She was away from her husband an...

Holding Up

As I walked the Penn campus on Monday I was struck by images of endings. This is a close-up of a campus information kiosk—all the advertisements, slogans, promises, queries snatched out from the rust-grip of staples. Come January, it will all be new again.

Here, in between corporate projects and Christmas shopping, between the tree I haven't gotten yet and the countless gifts I have, I am at work on a final round of edits for my adult novel. Come Monday, the book will be ready for prime tim...

Blog Famous

He wanted to sell me a hat.
I countered with a deal.
"How about if I promise," I proffered,"to make you blog famous?"

Garden Lights

If I happen to live on the storied Main Line, I happen to love the things that fall outside the history books, the guide books, the local gossip. This, for example, is the garden shop just down the street, which lights my way during evening strolls and heralds, always, Christmas.

Returning to Work

From the train platform at 30th Street Station, I always had this view of Cira Centre—of the offices, in particular, of Brandywine Realty Trust, a once and sometimes client. Waiting for the train on Monday evenings, I'd watch my friends across the way, huddled in meetings or hurrying back and forth, sitting alone with a pen in hand. I'd wonder what they were up to now, how their next buildings would shape the cityscape, what they would think of me if they turned and saw me—a teacher for a s...

English 145 (11): Tea

Today, taking the train to Penn, I watched my world going by. Twice herds of deer—if you can call four, then five deer a herd—were scattered by the oncoming locomotion and made a heady dash for the margins. Near Rosemont a fox was nearly caught by the tail. Near Overbrook a hawk got mired in some kind of mid-air scuffle with a bird half its size and twice as fast.

Once in the city, I walked, as I always do—through 30th Street, toward Drexel, then west and south, toward Penn. I was followed...

English 145 (11): Like Daughters and a Son, They are Loved

A man walking by took our picture.
It's a little fuzzy.
But.
I will forever treasure it.
Treasure them.

Holding On

Sometimes when I come to this computer and choose a photograph and settle it into its place on this blog, I only know what mood I am in, not what "what" I have to say. That is the case this evening. It has been a slow Sunday, one that has left me feeling awkward in relationship to myself.

For example: At church this morning, a perfect stranger approached me suggesting that I must not get much sleep; it was the darkness beneath my eyes, she said, that gave my insomnia away. But. I wanted t...

She Man

"Now, would that be a snow man or a snow woman you've got there?" I asked, as I strolled by.

"It's a girl!" she said (emphatic). "She's just missing her hat."

The View from Here

The view through my north-facing office window this morning.
White, but for the pink replacing gray.