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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Routine
I take the test, grade myself strictly, and add up the points. The result is that I’m likely an alcoholic and should seek treatment as soon as possible. I take the test again and grade myself more forgivingly, because forgiveness is a virtue.
April 2019
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Small Protest
The word fascist has lost all meaning. We need a new term to describe people who build detention camps for infants at the Texas border.
April 2019
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Greeter
I imagine them sending me to live with a family that is not my own. I have protected my parents for as long as I’ve been alive. If someone comes after them, I have teeth.
March 2019
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Ways To Take Your Coffee
With snow falling on blue spruce and a cardinal at the feeder and the fireplace’s crackly warmth easing into your bones and the final pages of a book about bears and the opening pages of a book about monks and no plans for the morning, the afternoon, the evening, tomorrow, next week, the rest of your life.
March 2019Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Love Running
Running is better for me than church; better than counseling, pills, or meditation; better than diet plans or twelve-step meetings. Running keeps me literally on the straight and narrow.
March 2019
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Girl Underwater
I was not afraid of alligators or snakes. I swam past them with some vague feeling that I was safer in the water with these creatures than on land with the humans.
February 2019
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Wild Dogs Of Hong Kong
I soon found out that the reservoir was where some locals dumped their unwanted dogs. I was there one afternoon with Sofia when a well-dressed woman stepped from a Mercedes and opened the back door.
February 2019
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Leaving Austin
It seems she was surprised to hear from me. “Marion,” she wrote back a week later, “I kinda liked you when I met you, and then I learned to love you, but now you’re just the skank that fucked my man when I was struggling to make a family.”
January 2019
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Hello, Goodbye
You want to write back, He died. You want your hurt to be the world’s hurt. This pain is what was born tonight. It’s a palpable, physical thing, an object of infinite dimension that can be looked at from many angles, held closely or at a distance, and always there is some new aspect of the sorrow.
January 2019
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Nomads
Einstein said that time moves at different rates throughout the universe. He must have been to Mexico, where time not only moves slower but has an altogether different texture and flavor than American time.
January 2019
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