The day after my grandmother died, I stayed home from school. She’d had a heart attack when my parents and I were on a picnic at Bear Mountain State Park. By the time we heard, it was too late. Although …
Because of some poor life choices I had made before the fall of 2005, I was working through the emotional pain my choices had left me. I was talking with a counselor once a week, and I had a cadre …
“They did it again!” I shriek. Anything in flight fascinates my three-year old twin brothers, especially our family’s personal possessions flying out windows. Lying in the grass nine floors down is my fairy-godmother costume skirt.
I sprint out of the …
The Greater Trochanter Rex?
Seriously, doesn’t that sound like a dinosaur straight out of Jurassic Park?
Yikes! Head for the hills! Here comes the greater trochanter rex!
But alas, that soubriquet is not of a big, toothy and dumb-as-a-door dino, …
I only spent one year at Second North School, the little public school across the street from St. Mary’s, and that’s only because St. Mary’s didn’t have a kindergarten. But right after kindergarten I was shipped across the street to …
Throughout history, the powerful neighbors occupied the land on which stood Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia of my youth. Its people had a long history of pain and heartbreak. The Soviet occupation was nothing new. Perhaps it was the ability to put our …
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 …