Doug Crandell
Doug Crandell does not play pickle-ball and manages to get poison ivy every summer. He doesn’t eat collard greens but does enjoy poached organic pears with a bit of blue cheese. He lives in Georgia.
(Un)Happy Meals
Whenever we heard the word layoff, my siblings and I thought of the food we’d soon be eating: watered-down beef stews and jar upon jar of canned beans and tomatoes that had been put up at the end of the previous summer. Meals during a layoff or a strike were always an inferior imitation of the ones we’d been raised on, as if someone had replaced our mother’s cooking with a cheap, generic version, all bland vegetables and thin broth.
March 2009Foreclosure
Our failing family farm had two trailer homes sitting vacant. To make ends meet, my parents rented one to Valerie, a pregnant, unwed twenty-three-year-old with tomato red hair who worked at the Kroger deli, where my mother was the manager.
July 2008Incredible Hulk Saving Souls
My father thought men who talked about being “saved” were weak, even feminine. Religion was the domain of women; he was too busy farming and working at the ceiling-tile factory to concern himself with salvation. My mother prayed and talked to me about God behind his back.
January 2007All The Hours And None Of The Words
My father returned to the table, his lips clamped tightly shut and his brow furrowed. “That was the union rep,” he said. My dad swallowed hard, then continued: “Carl accidentally ran over one of the twins last night with the mower. She’s dead.”
September 2005My Father’s Unholy Local Union
I knew my mother would find out before fall, when I’d leave home to find a real job. I’d watch her at the sink, her roan hair falling down, her round face red from the steaming dishwater, and I’d think about telling her, but it was impossible to open my mouth. I was sure something just under her pale skin would break if I revealed the truth: that my father was having an affair with a woman who looked like a man.
August 2004Wicked Birds
The Saturday my fingers were mauled I distinctly recall black birds everywhere. They clung to the electrical wires that draped from the several small outbuildings to the large red barn in the center of the farm. The birds called from the walnut trees and hopped among the combed-over swatches of fescue in the steaming pasture.
June 2003
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