This fall I wrote an essay about economic security, about my Dad, about the pandemic. It’s a bit long for a blog post, so here are a few excerpts:

My father’s father lost his father in the influenza epidemic in 1920. At age ten, Grandpa became the man of a family saddled with farm debt. He had to help support his sister and his mother, who had lost seven children as babies before she lost her husband too. And then, just when Grandpa was starting his adult life, he faced the Great Depression…

At the United State of Women Conference in May 2018 in Los Angeles, our new Vice President Kamala Harris talked about being a joyful warrior. That idea thrilled me.

I love the idea of a joyful, celebratory power. An unobstructed graceful fullness that creates things, that does not break them. A radiant power without limits. A power that activates talents, voices and energy. A purely female power. I’ve been working on an essay about the heritage of my own power. Here’s a bit of it…

Is it too soon to think and write about things that seem less important? Things like beautiful clothes, about fancy earrings, about how red lipstick doesn’t pair well with a mask? Finally getting my hair cut in September re-ignited the vanity that’s lain dormant within me for months! Meanwhile, I recently finished an essay called “A Girlhood in Color” about growing up, described in five fabrics. Here are two segments of that essay . . .

We’ve been living with pandemic restrictions for a full six months now. In California, I’m guessing, we’ll be in lockdown for the rest of this year and into the next one. I feel like a fish adapting to breathe in brackish water – not swimming in the clear, clean water of normal life, but not tossed about in the cloudy, roiling surf of pandemic panic either.

Facemasks feel normal now, choosing what to watch and read every night has become a quiet pleasure, makeup no longer matters . . .

I’m nineteen years old. I’m wearing a floral dress, singing How Beautiful Are the Feet from Handel’s Messiah for my Mormon church congregation in Los Angeles on Easter Sunday. This aria is high, it’s slow, it requires precision and purity. There’s no place to hide. I am terrified through every breath, but once the piano starts and everyone is looking at me there’s nothing to do but keep going until I finish. So I sing. And then I walk off of the dais, sit down in a pew at the side of the chapel and burst into surprised, uncontrollable tears. 

As I write this morning, I’m listening to mournful Max Richter music and thinking about what it means to be alive now. The tectonic plate shifts in the first months of 2020 broke apart “normal life” all around the world. Here in America the virus forced us to confront the economic inequality and health disparities that lay beneath the way our country works. George Floyd’s murder was the tragic catalyst that opened millions upon millions of eyes to the racism that was embedded in America’s DNA before there was an America.