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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
God Is Not Dead, He’s Busy Making Sure Nicole Kidman Wins Another Oscar
I was walking on the ice. Let me say up front that I am not a foolish woman, that the ice was thick and I was dressed warmly. Let me add that, though I do drink too much on occasion, I wasn’t drinking that morning. I’d just had one teeny-tiny hit of good pot. That was all.
March 2004Clinic
I thought the place looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure. I put down my plate of eggs, grabbed the TV remote, and turned up the sound. It was an abortion-clinic bombing: one bomb to lure the law, a second bomb to blow them up.
March 2004
The Morel Of The Story
The year I moved to Montana, a man shot another man for picking huckleberries in “his” huckleberry patch. He claimed he thought the picker was a grizzly bear. I didn’t know which to fear more: grizzlies or men with guns. A city girl, I was used to people getting shot — just not over huckleberries.
February 2004
House Proud
I first noticed the house early one spring afternoon as I was driving through Capaha Park in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where I’d taken a job teaching English at Southeast Missouri State. I was new in town and unfamiliar with the neighborhoods west of campus.
February 2004
All My Things Considered
In September 2002, I made the decision to move from California to Australia to live with my partner, and by December I was flying to Melbourne. In just two months, I packed up or got rid of all my material possessions.
February 2004
Sparrows In Purity Supreme
Sometimes when I’m sad, I become convinced that the world is going to end. And it will end someday, of course, but scientists give it billions of years yet. My “sense of impending doom” (the phrase psychiatrists use to describe this type of fear) is all out of proportion to what I know to be true.
February 2004
Prodigal Daughter
Makendra trailed loss and mess and catastrophe the way Halley’s comet trails a cloudy veil of ice and gas. She was dark-skinned and lovely, with finely arched eyebrows and sharp cheekbones. She could have been a fashion model if not for the birthmark that covered one side of her face like a pale pink shadow.
January 2004
Heat
The heat that summer was a living thing that tangled around you, tripping you, slowing you to a crawl. New York City was draped in an impressionist haze. It was 1957. I was thirteen and had my first job, stapling tags onto winter clothes in the warehouse of a department store.
January 2004
How To Make God Laugh
A full moon is rising peach-colored the night of the five-hundred-year anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the New World. Six months ago I planned for this to be the day I’d finish my novel.
January 2004
Two Minutes
I met my boyfriend through the personals. His ad said that he was looking for a woman who was “athletic.” I assumed that was a code word for “thin.” After we’d been dating for several months, he told me I was wrong, that “athletic” had actually meant athletic.
January 2004
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