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Disability
Instructions
Making green-chili stew, answering an ad in the “Casual Encounters” section of Craigslist, writing the number 8
February 2009
Baton Rouge
It was hot and I wanted to die, in a way. I was tired of being twenty-five years old and festering as an undergraduate at one of the largest cow colleges in the deep South.
July 2008
Along For The Ride
Up until two weeks before her death, my mother drove her little Toyota through the streets of Boston every day. She couldn’t do it alone; my father had to help her. He guided her in and out of the car and turned the key in the ignition.
April 2006
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
Getting Away
After a cycling accident left my husband, Ralph, a quadriplegic, I had a furtive fear that, given the opportunity, I might bolt. I might up and leave him and all his problems. Like a deer avoiding an oncoming vehicle, I’d dash away and disappear forever into the safety of a thick, impenetrable forest.
January 2004
The Pleasure Was All Mine
“Leroy’s going to stay here for a little while,” Jerry announced to my husband Ralph and me one day. Leroy stood behind him looking skinny and frail, dressed in a frayed nylon sweat suit and carrying a paper sack of belongings.
October 2003
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