I was peeling roasted beets this morning, as per a recipe in the delightful cookbook, Nothing Fancy, by Alison Roman. Wearing surgical gloves to prevent my hands from looking like a murderer’s, I began to slip the roasted skins off the beets and what came to mind was how very evocative! Something like the feeling of slipping off stockings.

Amusing, frustrating and challenging my friends, I have always had a burning need to find or apply terms for things. All kinds of things like a term for the moment after catharsis.

In some countries and cultures a death in the family is met with a full year of official mourning: black clothing, a dearth of celebration of birthdays, national and religious holidays, frequent visits to the gravesite and an obsessive devotion to the memory of the deceased. Candles are lit, flowers are replaced, graveside debris is swept away.

Here in North America, it’s about 20 minutes.

Apologies off the top to all those incredible, funny, insightful, bold, irreverent writers whose political commentaries I have followed for the past year plus. I have to mute you for a while, and I feel tremendously bad about it, but my mental health makes it imperative.

There’s a moment of weightless limbo when you move from one state to another, liquid to gaseous, for example.

Or from independent adult to fatherless child. That moment came for me last Wednesday at 11:35 a.m. when my father died.

Chances are good you recently tried to lift something, or jump off a rock wall, or go back to a sport you used to love. Please tell me you didn’t strap on the hockey pads after marinating them in the garage for a decade…

The man sitting next to me is a tightly wound bundle of energy, or ADD, hard to tell. He is in his 60s, lean and wiry like a crazed marathoner, and does everything quickly and with gusto. He stuffs a laptop and a book, Michael Lewis’ Premonition, into the seatback pocket and pulls out a large plastic bag which contains, as it turns out, multiple sandwiches and some blue cheese (for which he apologizes later. We agree boiled eggs would have resulted in a seat change request.)

My Friday morning yoga instructor announced today she was leaving and I became ridiculously sad and emotional even though I don’t know her all that well.

Road work flag people fill me with impotent rage, simply by default. Occasionally one will warm my cold, cold heart and I will acknowledge them, regally, with a small, wrist-based wave.

Why is this? Why this disproportionate anger toward strangers just out there doing the job?

When I travelled to El Salvador some years ago I was immediately struck by the glaring disparity of how people lived. Corrugated roof shacks surrounded by brick walls and topped with razor wire because, no matter how little you have, there’s someone wanting to take it from you.