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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Confessions From A Conversion Van
The owner of the sports bar knows I sleep in the parking lot on weeknights. He doesn’t seem to mind. I’m a curiosity — the homeless professor. He thinks I must be one of a kind, but I’m not so sure. Anyway, I’m not even a professor. More like an adjunct instructor. I’d move closer to work, but I could never afford to live in Martinsburg now that it’s becoming a D.C. bedroom community.
October 2009
Spring Comes To New Jersey
I’ve been thinking lately about eccentricity. The word eccentric is from Greek astronomy; it describes a celestial object whose movements aren’t centered around the earth. The ancient Greeks saw the planets moving through the sky with no apparent direction and called them “wandering stars” (asteres planetai).
October 2009
You, All Of You
His palsied hands shiver as he twists the fishing line one, two, three, four times around, then threads it through. He pulls the tangle of line tight and drops the blue-silver lure. It swings between us. “That’s a fisherman’s knot,” Pa Peters tells me, and he chuckles and pushes his thick glasses up the bridge of his bent nose. “That’s how you do it.”
September 2009
The Classified Ad
The Sumner Press, the weekly paper from my hometown in southeastern Illinois, continues to arrive in my mailbox in Ohio even though I’m not a subscriber. A few years ago, when my wife and I were the grand marshals for the Sumner fall-festival parade, the publisher gave us a complimentary one-year subscription. The subscription has run out, but the paper keeps coming, as if a higher power has decided I need it in my life.
September 2009
What You Think About
You hang up the cellphone and think about how the surgeon cleared his throat again and again as he asked how you were, then said, “I have the best news of bad news,” and you think how you knew what he was going to say as soon as you heard his voice.
September 2009
Taking A Life
It was a brilliantly sunny October day, and I was driving on Route 100 alongside Vermont’s White River when the driver of the logging truck in front of me slammed on the brakes. I stopped just in time to avoid a collision and saw a great animal floundering in the middle of the road up ahead. Someone had hit a white-tailed deer, a doe.
September 2009
The Closest I’ve Come To God
I wake up at 8:50 A.M. and whip around the house frantically, not wanting to be late for my women’s Alcoholics Anonymous meeting: feed the cat, grab my knitting, splash water on my face, pour some half-perked coffee, and speed into town.
August 2009
Theo’s Map
My friend’s uncle scared me. He lived in a dome house he’d built from compressed styrofoam blocks, giving it the appearance of an igloo. It had a composting toilet and a dirt floor, and it looked absolutely extraterrestrial on the little plot of ground across the pasture from our Kentucky farm, such that I thought it might simply lift off and head into the Milky Way, leaving the fields of corn behind.
August 2009
By Song, Not Album
My dad flew to Paris to rescue me, armed with music and marijuana. I was in France to study the language as part of my college major. Before that I’d spent a few months at a Buddhist monastery in India, where I’d experienced for the first time since childhood what it was like to be happy every day, to enjoy waking up each morning.
August 2009
Suburban Bitch Cruise
Virginia and I were in an English-literature class together during my senior year at the State University of New York at Albany. She wore black-rimmed “cafe girl” glasses and had one of those bright, pale faces that slips back and forth from plain to attractive. Altogether her style was a mixture of grunge and hippie, and I found Virginia sexy as hell. During the week that we covered James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, she and I united against the close-minded faction in class who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, comprehend how one man could love another. We chastised them on breaks and shouted them down during discussions. At the end of class one evening, Virginia discovered that I, too, liked getting high, and she smiled — her face alive with mischief — and counted off three words on her fingers: Suburban. Bitch. Cruise.
July 2009
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