It's Thankful Week.

There's lots of talk going around these days about American Exceptionalism. I agree we are exceptional. So is everyone else. The tiny list below betrays my own limitations - I have no idea of what makes Azerbaijan exceptional - but I do know that American Exceptionalism is composed of bits and pieces of all of these and more:

Shakespeare=English exceptionalism
Brie=French exceptionalism
Curry=Indian exceptionalism
Bach=German exceptionalism
Tango=Argentinian exceptionalism
Vodka=Russian exceptionalism
Fireworks=Chinese exceptionalism Read more about Exceptional

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." That is the iconic opening sentence in Gabriel Garcia Marquez' . Read more about Diversity on Ice

Monday morning. My backyard is filling up with leaves. Behind me, a desk and table are piled high with stuff en route from the old backroom, now Caroline's bedroom, to the bookshelves in my bedroom, where I've piled all the books en route to new homes.

Somewhere in this machine is a nearly completed, but still unfinished - or is that nearly finished, but still incomplete? - novel.

My back - oh, we really will not go there. Read more about Getting On With It

... noooooooo. Not going there.

I am not a zombie fan. The first time I tried to watch Night of the Living Dead was on a Halloween night 20 umpteen years ago. My boyfriend was busy tending to something that could be characterized as "illegal" and I was trying my best to be seasonally festive. Alone. I couldn't watch the end. Read more about Night of the ...

State Sen. Scott White of Seattle dies at 41

My eyes lit on the headline in my e-mail feed Saturday morning and refused to move on. There's something important here, my sleep-fogged brain kept insisting. Read it again. Pay attention.

Senator Scott White. He died. He's gone. How can that be? Read more about Scott

Opera can be embarrassing. The music is wonderful, the poetry is 19th Century sentimentality. How can you listen to lines like "Oh sweet kisses, oh languid caresses and I, quivering, unveiled those beautiful shapes!!!" without wincing?

Placido Domingo, in a recent Great Performances production, talked about singing Tosca. Why he loved it. It's the emotion, he said. Lines like "languid caresses" bother him not at all. He gets it. He gets into it. Listen!

And the stars were shining… the earth Read more about Heartfelt

My favorite picture of the three days I spent with my favorite sister is one I carry only in my head: in it my sister Joan, her husband Mete and I are sitting around their kitchen table in Lafayette, IN, Joan and I on our netbooks, Mete on his Ipad, sipping tea and talking - yes, talking to each other. At the same time. It was a true communion of spirits. Read more about My Favorite Sister

Last week I got into the wayback machine and leapfrogged through a kaleidoscope of past lives. There was first a visit to my brother's house on the north side of Chicago, a little north of the neighborhood in which I lived with my first husband and where I brought my first child home. I remember riding the Ravenswood El into work and fighting my way east to the lakefront against biting winds and blowing snow. I remember when the Prudential Building was the tallest skyscraper in town. Read more about Time Travel

Slave, slave, slave.

That is the mantra I sometimes grumble to myself these days when doing some paltry little task that I know is far from actual work and a galaxy from actual slave labor.

It is, of course, a bit of self-mockery.

In a time long ago and a place relatively far away, my ex-husband and I owned an 80-acre farm. He had an actual job. I did a lot of the actual farming. Read more about Work, work, work.

It's cloudy this morning. Cool. Green. Red and white twinkle lights left over from the summer parties are still plugged in. There's a lavender and gold play castle sitting in the garden house window. That's left over from a party - a year or two ago? A rusty iron dragonfly is leaning against the blue-needled white pine, both temporarily bereft of the variety of juncos and chickadees that will soon be here. I know this, because I just refilled the suet feeders, hoping to lure the first waves of the winter people. Read more about Home Alone