I was born in Tokyo, as was my mother; a college housemate lives there now, writing for Reuters, as do my cousins, who work (currently non-stop) for the American Embassy. There are writers I care about who live in Japan, like Literary Mama’s co-editor for fiction, Suzanne Kamata, and one of the contributors to the anthology I’m working on now. Luckily, no one I know has been hurt by the quake and tsunami, but of course tens of thousands of people have — I can’t bring myself to look up the latest numbers, they are so devastating.

There are tangible things one can do to help those in Japan, of course — give money; shop at a Bakesale for Japan; read for Japan — but I am a strong believer in the power of prayer — or good wishes, or positive thinking, whatever you want to call it. So I was so pleased when a school parent organized a wishing tree project at school. She arranged for the donation of a Japanese maple, one of the kindergarten teachers made the blank tags, and students, faculty, staff and parents have been adding their wishes every day. Here is a tiny sample of their many sweet wishes:

I’m happy to serve again this year as San Francisco’s ambassador for World Read Aloud Day, an event organized by LitWorld to call attention to the power and pleasures of reading aloud.  Litworld reminds us that nearly 1 billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their name and asks, “What would you miss most if you could not read or write? Imagine your world without words.”
LitWorld works with teachers, parents, community members, and children to support the development of sustainable literacy practices across the world.

In San Francisco, I’ll be celebrating by reading to kids at Books, Inc. in Laurel Village. Join us from 6 – 7 PM for a pajama party reading; anyone who donates $10 or more to LitWorld will be entered into a raffle for these delicious hot chocolate cubes. Bring the kids in their pj’s for a fun evening outing!

Nine observations about nine:

It’s my favorite number, squared.

It’s the number of innings in my favorite sport.

It’s the number of months (approximately) a baby gestates.

It’s the number of lives a cat enjoys.

It’s the number of squares in a game of tic-tac-toe.

It’s the number of planets I grew up with (sorry, Pluto, we miss you).

It’s an expression — dressed to the nines! — for looking fabulous, for going the distance — the whole 9 yards — and, if you’re on cloud nine, you might feel as I do today, celebrating my firstborn’s ninth year. Happy birthday, Ben!

Since becoming a parent, I can’t really tolerate scary movies but sad movies still draw me in. The recent film Rabbit Hole, based on the play by David Lindsay-Abaire, is one of the best I’ve seen in a while. Here’s an excerpt from my recent column:

I took myself off to see Rabbit Hole alone, tissues at hand, ready to handle the weepy. Nicole Kidman plays Becca, whose four-year-old son Danny was struck by a car and killed eight months before the film’s action. Becca is the center of the action, in practically every scene, and she’s not necessarily an easy object of sympathy. She’s brusque with her sister, rude to her mom, detached and eye-rolling at a grief group. When another of the parents suggests that God must have taken her child because he needed another angel, Becca can’t keep quiet any longer: “Why didn’t he just make another angel? He’s God, after all.”

Please click on over to Literary Mama to read the rest.

We don’t make a big deal of Valentine’s Day, though we make cards for each other and exchanged little gifts (for me: chocolate caramel hearts; for Tony: a giant-cube ice tray to keep his evening whiskey cold; for the boys: chocolate lollipops). But I did want to make a special dessert, and with my heart-shaped cookie cutter, it didn’t take much effort to do this:

That’s one vanilla ice cream heart, and one heart each of ginger cake and vanilla pound cake (gifts for our New Year’s Day party that I’d stuck in the freezer for a day like this), plus a little puddle of chocolate sauce (I tried to make a heart, but the sauce resisted my decorative efforts.) Of the red sauce, Ben asked brightly, “Is that blood?” No, it’s raspberry sauce — nothing more than a pint of raspberries pureed in the blender, pushed through a sieve, and brightened with a squeeze of lemon juice. Eli said “This is the best dessert EVER!” and proved it:

Last week at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference, I heard Jhumpa Lahiri give an inspiring keynote speech in which she said that becoming a writer is “taking the leap from listening to saying ‘Listen to me’.”

Well, at the risk of being a bit self-promoting, I invite you to listen to me on Friday, in a radio interview with Literary Mama columnist Cassie Premo Steele. Cassie is a beautiful writer whom I had the pleasure of meeting a couple years ago at a Mama, PhD event. She is smart and funny, interested in writing and books and mothering and good food, and so we are sure to have a fun conversation. I hope you’ll listen in!

The show is Friday, February 11th from 8:30 to 8:45 AM, PST. Click here to tune in.

edited to add: click here to listen to the archived version of the show.

I always used to say that breakfast is my favorite meal — it’s the one time of the day when you can justify eating dessert (pancakes! waffles! coffeecake!) as your main course — but lately my allegiance is swinging toward lunch. I still love breakfast, but usually I’m too sleepy to be any more creative than to eat my standard bowl of granola.

Lunch offers time for anticipation. Lunch permits a bit of planning. Which is not to say my lunch is always fancy or complicated — usually it’s not; often it’s a sandwich, or some leftovers, or a simple salad. Occasionally I meet a friend or even — when the stars align — my husband, and we’ll eat out. And one of my favorite lunches is in the school cafeteria.

I write about school lunch this month in my column for Literary Mama; here’s an excerpt:

My boys, as I tell them regularly, are incredibly lucky with their school lunch program. It wasn’t always this way. My husband went to the same school, in a time when on hot dog day one lucky kid was served a rubber hot dog, which meant free seconds and a bag of chips. I always wonder how many kids bit into that rubber hot dog (and how many of them took two bites before realizing their mistake). The school, like most schools, used to house vending machines full of sodas and candy. But then gradually — and not without difficulty or complaint — things changed.

The rest is posted at Literary Mama; click on over and tell me about your own school lunch experience.

My poor, long-neglected blog and blog readers, I am back and determined not to let Facebook status updates and tweets drain all my blogging energy away… anymore. I hope you’ll check in regularly.