It used to be that a person driving in a car alone, grinning broadly, sobbing or staring rapt and open mouthed would be considered a little loony. People would quickly glance away before the nose picking began. Today we assume a Bluetooth is in the ear we can’t see. So I can get away with [...]
Author Archive
Fence sitting
If my particular cocktail of genetics, science and luck follow the patterns of my grandparents, I may be at the exact halfway point in my life. I often imagine myself as tiptoeing on the top of a fence that divides youth and old age, my arms thrown wide, trying to keep it all, trying to balance; one hand [...]
Mine
When I was in sixth grade I started a fight at school. Actually it wasn’t much of a fight. I attacked and the other girl cried.
Here is what happened. The teacher asked us to create family crests. We were given a sheet of construction paper with a shield shape mimeographed on one side. The assignment [...]
Opening night
I had trouble concentrating today. I was even more fidgety than usual: shuffling printed emails into random stacks, moving my pen from tote to desk and then dropping it on the floor, walking into rooms without remembering why. My body was jerky, projecting sympathetic butterflies from another stomach. Tonight is opening night for my son, the [...]
Defending Rudolph
When I was four, we lived in an apartment complex that divided a gingerbread house neighborhood and a ramshackle, riverbank neighborhood – one with neat little blocks of brick and garden, the other with litter strewn yards, debris from basements flooded every spring. Our buildings stood in between, a corridor of indecision for renters on [...]
