Who’s up for a good, clean rant? Buckle up folks, we’re about to go in.
POSTCARD #1. Birmingham Zoo You ask the kids to name their spirit animal. I listen and wait my turn. Butterflies, bats, beavers, and jaguars. Nannies pushing strollers behind elegant mothers. I want to say I’d be the tigress, claws pitched open, teeth angling to slice– or the giraffe one head above the tallest oak tree, bird’s view, soil […]
It’s never easy to accept that your kid is all grown up. I remember the shock I felt when my eldest daughter first told me that she had a boyfriend. Granted, she was six, and it was a boy she held hands with in preschool, but it was the first moment when I actually thought: […]
I’m staring at my grandmother in her coffin. I’ve never seen a dead body before. My grandmother was 85 years old when she died. I was 25 at the time. I had been to many funerals in my life. I had a lot of old relatives when I was a child, and it seemed like […]
The day my father retired, he dubbed it a privileged occurrence, joyous even. Buoyant. The man worked on his vocabulary, memorized poems, in particular those that rhymed. Fond of Longfellow and Robert Service, he could by heart quote “Hiawatha” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” He dodged games like Scrabble or Boggle and puzzles of […]
“I felt like I was deep in a psychedelic trip.”