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Romantic Love
The Happiest Day Of Someone Else’s Life
Love, they say, can move mountains. Less romantically, love has also been known to move mountains of crap. My college friend Logan and his mountain of crap arrived in New York City from Boston in a twenty-three-foot U-Haul truck, complete with the same six wooden peach crates of aging vinyl I had helped him pack and unpack at least three times through the years.
January 2009
Baggage: A Love Story
I have never understood those personal ads that specify the seeker is looking for a person with “no baggage.” What does that mean, exactly? Who hasn’t accumulated regrets and scars — not to mention a storage unit’s worth of junk — by middle age? Show me someone with no baggage, and I’ll show you someone who forgot to pack.
January 2009
Since You Asked
Cary Tennis has been called the “Walt Whitman of advice columnists” by one of his regular readers. His daily column “Since You Asked” has been a hallmark of Salon.com since 2001. Tennis offers frank and sometimes pointed advice, and he reveals his own struggles with refreshing candor. He is part spiritual advisor, part fellow flawed human, part friend who’ll give it to you straight. He can also craft a mean sentence.
January 2009The Three Ages Of Woman
Once a man promised to wait all day for me at Rome’s Piazza della Repubblica, to wait all day and into the night for me to arrive. I was taking an overnight bus from Prague to Venice, then a water taxi from the bus to the train station, and finally a train from Venice to Rome. We had no idea how long it would take.
December 2008
The Right Wind
You’ve heard the old lovers’ cliché: “I don’t know where you end and I begin”? I don’t buy it. When my husband’s life ended — that’s when I didn’t know where mine began.
July 2008
Foreclosure
Our failing family farm had two trailer homes sitting vacant. To make ends meet, my parents rented one to Valerie, a pregnant, unwed twenty-three-year-old with tomato red hair who worked at the Kroger deli, where my mother was the manager.
July 2008
Chance Encounters
Thirty-fifth high-school reunion, fly-fishing, the 1960 World Series
May 2008
Confessions Of A B-Movie Zombie
One night I read a short, autobiographical story about how difficult it was being a B-movie zombie. Afterward a few people I didn’t know came over to my table, the most interesting of whom was an attractive teenager who appeared to be part Asian. Though it was winter, she wore a short skirt and sat with her knees together, hands in her lap, and gazed at me.
March 2008
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