Browse Topics
Friendship
A Neighbor
When he noticed four teenage kids from the Mission School / lugging boxes out of her house, he phoned her / — his neighbor just up the road — & she told him / that escrow had closed a week early: she’d be gone / by late afternoon.
May 2013Side By Side
When I pull up to my house after work, my friend Eppie is standing in the middle of our shared driveway, clutching her green canvas shopping bag. Her face shows relief and then worry as I get out of my car. “I hate to bother you,” she says, “but would you mind taking me home?”
April 2013
James Hillman Never Said Hello To Me
All of which is to say: James Hillman loved and embodied paradox — not only the play of opposites but also the effluvia that attach to the play of opposites. For James nothing was quite as it seems, except in those highly improbable moments when things are exactly as they seem. (He would have insisted on that exception.)
July 2012
Grimace In The Burnt Black Hills
After six states, 1,300 miles, and almost twenty-four hours, the iron tang of blood and bleach still hadn’t blown out of my truck. And that’s saying something because since the fire I can’t hardly smell dog shit if I step in it.
July 2012
The Unspeakable Things Between Our Bellies
I don’t identify with most other mothers — the conversations about clothes and music lessons and camps and milestones in development. The only mothers I truly feel OK around are the ones whose kids have something different about them. Something odd. Or wrong. Or worse.
June 2012
Free Rent At The Totalitarian Hotel
I lived downtown in an apartment complex that, for its Second Empire facade, transient tenantry, and despotic manager, I had dubbed the “Totalitarian Hotel.” The manager, Mrs. Vollstanger, was a gouty old Prussian and always wore pearls and thick, embroidered white sweaters.
June 2012
On The Verge Of Extinction
From ten Saturday morning — when your father picks you up at the house you don’t want to live in, your mother’s boyfriend’s house — to eight Sunday night, when your mother retrieves you from the house you never wanted to leave but are now allowed to visit only twice a month, you have thirty-four hours for your father to prove to you that he’s not the man your mother says he is.
June 2012
Faithful Over A Few Things
Faithfully, every week, I visit Elsie, age ninety-two. We’ve been friends for thirteen years. For the first ten she was my neighbor on a street of homes built in the 1930s and 1940s and shaded by large sycamores. Then, three years ago, I left my husband behind in the gray duplex we shared, and ever since, I have driven twenty minutes from the neighboring town for our weekly evening of chatting and bad television.
May 2012
The Hurricane
I write this at my parents’ home in Brooklyn as Hurricane Irene is approaching. Citizens are flocking to stores, buying out shelves of food. The mayor and the governor are issuing stern warnings. The television is talking nonstop, calling it a “monster storm,” measuring its winds at 105 miles per hour. This may be the “Storm of the Century.”
May 2012
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