My mother, though a registered nurse, fractured the English language to the delight of some and the embarrassment of others. Swedish was her first language. My father, though a machinist, enjoyed wordplay and spoke English rather well. He, too, was …
Gray clouds moved overhead, blocking the sun while insulating the land. Winter after the holidays. Joy stripped from the air. Lights on houses looked silly. Mountains of snow, stained by traffic, at the corner of every road.
I wondered how …
Two pit bulls lumber to the roadside fence as my friends and I pull up to the clapboard house. The dogs’ slavering jaws and muscled shoulders strain against the wire gate. My heart races. I’m reluctant to step out of …
In 2011, on a brutally hot August morning, my eighty-seven-year-old mother and I arrived at Florida’s West Palm Beach airport for her final flight to New York. On arrival, two good-natured stewards seated mom in a wheelchair and escorted us …
What does it say about me that, when someone steals my identity, I’m offended if they use it to shop at a dollar store? I have nothing against dollar stores per se. But would it kill them to go to …
When I think about my death, which happens more frequently than it used to, I consider my quirky, beautiful objects. I love my things, not as a consumer and not exactly as a collector; everything in my home I either …
My grandmother, my mother’s mother, sacrificed her teens and twenties to taking care of her father. Since her mother predeceased her and as the oldest girl, my grandmother took on the task of tending to her father who had a …
We often spent weekends with Auntie Anne, my mother’s older sister, and Uncle Paul at their Long Island two-bedroom suburban home in North Babylon, out in Suffolk County. To get there the five of us piled into my dad’s two-tone …
No matter how many years I’d been teaching, the first day of class was always the same—nerve-wracking. Did I remember all my handouts? Had I made enough copies? Did I remember to bring the roster, the art samples, the textbook? …
A slight breeze blew out toward the grandstands. I stared in toward home plate and picked up the catcher’s sign. I raised my right arm, hardball in my hand, and eyed the batter. The count was three balls, two strikes, …