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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Happy Bird Day Lorenzo
Just as I am about to leave for the North, my birthday appears. I’m willing to forget it, but my pals won’t hear of it. When I get to La Huerta late in the afternoon on my last day in Puerto Perdido, they bring out a cake that they’ve bought with their own money.
March 2000Open Season
The redwoods of northern California rise around us as we snake along Highway 101 somewhere south of Eureka. The air here is plush, sunlight slanting through wisps of fog among the trees. Looking out the window, my daughter says, “Look, Mommy. The light is realer.”
March 2000Practicing Love
We are walking in a ticker-tape parade. That’s all that’s going on. Some pieces of confetti read “great calves,” some “chronic sinus,” some “no noticeable hair loss,” some “multiple sclerosis,” and some “third-finger amputation.” Don’t judge your neighbor by what pieces of paper fall on his or her shoulders. Don’t think you are cursed or blessed by what pieces fall on yours.
March 2000Heaven And Earth
A few years after my arrival, I move with my husband to Koreatown, a colorful neighborhood where our jewel of an apartment gleams quietly amid a cacophonous welter of Salvadoran taco vendors, alley-cruising crack-heads, and ambulance sirens wailing the news that yet another Seoul-trained driver has merrily run a red light.
February 2000Spring
This is what my mother, in the end, couldn’t bear: the forward rush of possibility, the hum of new life buzzing in the air as winter opens to spring. Surrounded by such sweet promise, she felt as empty as a footprint pressed in dried mud.
February 2000Leaving The West
The first time I hear the voice is in the fall, when the larch trees have just begun to change color. I’m driving out of Washington’s Blue Mountains along Cloverland Road just above the Snake River. Cloverland is a series of hair-pin turns and S curves bordered by a sheer drop into a canyon full of snakes, sage, and yellow star thistle.
February 2000Body Bright
No matter how much we camouflage or medicate them, our bodies remain wild, bright sparks from the great encompassing wildness, perfectly made for savoring and exploring this sensuous planet; and that is a source of hope.
February 2000And Jill Came Tumbling After
I’ve heard the story of Ralph’s bicycle accident so many times that it gets on my nerves. Ralph tells it over and over, whenever anybody asks, and even when they don’t. The story goes like this: He went out on Tuesday for his regular sixty-mile training ride. As he came down the hill off Grizzly Peak onto Claremont Avenue, the front tire of his Italian racing bike went flat. He went up on the embankment, riding on the rim. Then he lost control, went headfirst over the handlebars, and landed on his back, snapping his neck in the process.
January 2000Five Unusual Things I Saw At Doctor McVee’s The Summer I Turned Nine
An off-duty fireman who had sawed a fifty-five-gallon drum in half to make a double barbecue pit, then by accident had tipped one of the halves over with hot coals. The barrel had pinned his bare feet to his deck and broiled them.
January 2000Finding A Good Man
I have not been in a relationship with a man for more than a year now, a situation that has resulted in a dangerously high increase in my doughnut consumption. I eat doughnuts each time I realize, with fresh pain, that the men I’m attracted to are completely out of reach: monogamous, left-leaning, gentle-spirited, broad-shouldered carpenters with a love for the works of minor poets — and, inevitably, a family.
January 2000
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