“B Dublee dubblel dubblee K,” my grandmother said triumphantly, when I asked her to spell the name of her hometown. She smiled happily, glad she had remembered. My mother interjected, “That’s not how you spell it! It’s b,e,double l, double …
The first home I made for myself was in Italy. I had come there for my senior year of college with the intention of remaining after I graduated and seeing if I could turn myself into a writer. I had decided …
There was a barking in the distance. I fought my way through a thick fog. It grew louder and louder until suddenly it was right next to my ear. I opened my eyes and realized I had been dreaming. But, the barking. That was very …
I interviewed for my last job in 1993 when there were no cell phones; the internet was in its infancy. Blackberry was familiar as a fruit. Next year, a careless driver ran over me as I walked my dogs, leading …
It is dinner time. As I so often do, instead of sitting in the cafeteria, I am eating my dinner in the garden adjacent to the Catholic hospital where I work the evening shift. The nuns of the hospital had …
My English teacher, Mrs. A., had short gray hair and dark brown eyes that could pin you like a dead insect. A petite, attractive woman in her early fifties, she was a sharp dresser, down to her sturdy high heels. …
The women cried and wailed and prayed behind us, and my 7-year-old mind thought the dead body would look like something from the movies. I never saw a dead body before, and I was certain that it would look like …
There’s a huge homeless problem in the city of Sacramento, California. I was born there, so I’d seen parts of it. Vaguely. Then I left for college, and then tutored and taught and volunteered in San Francisco and the world.…
(Or, how I escaped government work and became free as the breeze)
Sweltering day on the Oklahoma/Texas border, bridge job, late 1950’s. Hot and humid, maybe 105 degrees, It was the kind of day where you could lose eight pounds, …
Memory does not remember much of this day, forty-five years ago when a recent college graduate made his way from North Carolina to Jacksonville, Florida. But we know that his trip involved a young girl he had met the previous …