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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Madness Equation
When your child goes mad, you begin to question everything you once thought to be true. Even if you’ve been a questioning person all your life, as I have, the things you took for granted — or, as my college English students often write, “for granite” — no longer lie rock-hard in your palm, but shift and slip away like sand.
September 2006
God’s Day
Still, there is one day in the year when I go plumb God-happy. It’s a made-up holiday pulled randomly from the calendar, as far away from the retail conspirators and their chocolate bunnies and sawed-off pine trees as I can get; a twenty-four-hour period of gratitude, humility, and atonement I call “God’s Day.”
September 2006
Fighting CIS
Last night my mother told me, “We just got DSL” — a high-speed Internet hookup for the computer. As we talked, we discovered that neither of us knew what DSL stands for. (Subsequent research revealed that it means “digital subscriber line.” Of course, it is also “LSD” backward.)
September 2006
The Ultimate Kindness
War and peace start in the hearts of individuals. Strangely enough, even though all beings would like to live in peace, our method for obtaining peace over the generations seems not to be very effective: we seek peace and happiness by going to war. This can occur at the level of our domestic situation, in our relationships with those close to us.
September 2006
The Marriage Bed
You will have to take my word on this: we loved each other. We were married to other people, we fell in love, and finally we were together and then married, for thirty years. We both expected Bill to die first; I was twenty-seven years old and he was fifty-four when we met, and through all of those years, even from the beginning, I told myself that I could live with his absence because our love would carry me the way a wave carries the light of the sun.
August 2006
Palm Springs
“Hello there, Kenny Rogers,” he says to the maitre d’; then he turns to my stepmother and me and jerks a thumb at the man as if he were made of wax. “Don’t he look like Kenny Rogers?” My father lets out a horse laugh and pokes the maitre d’ in the ribs.
August 2006
Good Enough
What can I trust my mother to do? She will usually come when I need her. She will love my children as fiercely as I do, but in an older, less-complicated way. She will frequently enrage me.
July 2006
Cry In The Wilderness
Unless I tell people about the voices, they don’t know. I’m not sure how this can be: that they don’t hear them, too. It’s suspicious, in fact. I want to crawl inside their heads and listen, see for myself where their thoughts come from.
July 2006
You’re In Here, Too
It’s morning but still dark out. It’s also raining and cold. I’m walking out of the twenty-four-hour fitness center, on my way to the all-night Waffle House, when a woman hails me from her car. She has just run away from her husband, she says, and needs gas money to get to her mother’s.
July 2006
Sweet Rolls And Vodka
At sunrise you climbed through your bedroom window at the recovery home and found a note waiting on your untouched pillow: “This was your final warning. Pack today.”
July 2006
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