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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Cleaned Out
One of the steps AA asks of recovering alcoholics is to make “a searching and fearless moral inventory” of themselves, and now, alone in my motel room, I find myself fairly obsessed with my stuff: how much of it there is and how long it will last. I have my laptop and a suitcase containing T-shirts, jeans, and khakis, three long-sleeved shirts, one pair of shorts, vitamins, and an assortment of toiletries. I have a tote bag stuffed with books, which will, along with the hiking boots I have brought for weekends, turn out to be the most useless items in my inventory.
January 2003The NEA And Me
Apparently you must not tell the NEA: “I want the money because I don’t like working. I find employment a little tedious.” Instead, you must invent some grand project goal the grant will help you achieve.
December 2002
Do You Know Calvin Jones?
I had seen Calvin beaten, scorned, humiliated by our father. I had been spared; Katie had been spared; Tema had been spared — all because of Calvin. He was the better target, the only son, born with one testicle, his head misshapen by the doctor’s forceps. He’d been our shield. In our daily reconnaissance, he was point.
December 2002
A Place To Stand
It was no surprise that the judge had given me the harshest sentence allowed by law. The nuns had always said I was a bad boy, and here was the judge making the same condemnation. I was sure I was convicted mostly because of who I was, expunged from a society that didn’t want people like me in it.
December 2002
Distant Signals
Dad always gave elaborate instructions on how to use things. Most of Dad’s instructions were negative, as though the right way to do things would occur to one eventually if all the ways to do it wrong could be enumerated and cautioned against.
November 2002
Ancient History
I stayed in bed, letting the news sink in. My father, whom I both loved and hated: gone. His death was a blessing. It was. I stared out the window at the gray Vermont sky. The house was quiet with the presence of death.
November 2002
Some Shelter
The atomic bomb would fall and we would duck and cover and it would be ok. There wasn’t a child in the room who didn’t know this was a baldfaced lie, the height of adult mendacity — as the older boys said, “Bullshit.”
November 2002
Au Revoir, Pleasant Dreams
Ten years older than my mother, my father retired soon after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in her midfifties. Despite cautions from doctors that it would be taxing, Dad kept her at home for twelve years.
October 2002
Human Services
When I first spot Glen on the Monashee Rail Trail, I almost wave to him. Then I stop myself, think better of it, and decide to pass him by. It’s OK. After all, a whole year has passed since I last saw Glen, and I am a new person: mother, wife, nonsmoker; my hair cut to shoulder length, my face free of makeup. It is all right to walk right past Glen.
October 2002
Used Poetry
It is the summer of my fiftieth year, and I have just returned from a long journey to pay my last respects to my mother’s sister Charlotte. Everyone called her Chad, pronounced “Shod.” Her husband of forty years, my Uncle Glenn, had preceded her in death by less than six weeks.
October 2002
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