Nina

“family reunion with Jacob’s discarded booster seats and board games. I am an only child. I have inherited it all. M. goes down there, once in a while, and hauls up a few boxes filled with long plastic containers of slides. There are thousands and thousands of them, mostly from my parents’ vacations, and they’ll be ruined soon if not already. He sifts through them and digitizes the ones”
― Dani Shapiro, Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

“For years now I have been keeping small, special notebooks into which I write passages that strike me hard as I read the work of others. Perhaps these are another form of diary. Certainly, they are deeply personal. I hadn’t known, when I started this practice, that these are sometimes called commonplace books. The notebooks I’ve chosen for this task fit into the palm of my hand, and into the back pocket of”
― Dani Shapiro, Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

“My meditation practice starts with a series of blessings. May I be safe. May I be happy. May I be strong. May I live with ease. The practice involves offering these blessings or wishes first to myself, then to a series of others:”
― Dani Shapiro, Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

“can’t part with the framed diplomas of my parents and their siblings. They were the first generation in my family to go to college. How does that get tossed in a Dumpster? My uncle’s pipe, my aunt’s forty-year-old golf clubs, ceramic figurines from my grandmother’s apartment in her assisted-living facility mingle as if at”
― Dani Shapiro, Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage