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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Ghost Of A Boy
You can belong to yourself, but it’s lonely, and you can belong to others, but there’s loss built into that, in uncountable forms.
December 2018
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Notes On Surrender
Over and over I have discovered that my children feel alienated in environments where, at their age, I felt an automatic sense of belonging.
December 2018
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Reverence
I bow to the pencil, the pencil maker, the tree that gave its wood, the graphite that fills its core, and the mind that conceived pencil. I bow to all the teeth and jaws that have chewed pencils out of boredom or nervousness.
November 2018Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Lonely Girl’s Guide To The Cosmos
There isn’t really a reset button for life — a switch you can hit, after you’ve gone through something terrible, that lets you go back to the beginning and start over. But there should be.
November 2018
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Fever
I lie on the couch in the living room and feel a deep sense of shame, because I’ve increased our debt by getting sick.
November 2018
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Survivor
Do I need to go into what turns an eleven-year-old into such a stoic: embarrassed to be sentimental, determined to be detached?
November 2018
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Garden Center
Daniela can’t stand Lisa. Exactly why, I’m not sure. I can see her criticizing Lisa, who is her boss, but Daniela’s anger goes well beyond mere criticism. I suspect her rage stems in part from their age difference.
November 2018
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
What Little She Had
It is one thing to be bad with money when you have it, and quite another to be bad with it when you don’t. My mother gave away what little she had, mostly because she had been taught that every poor person she met was the Lord in disguise, testing her love.
October 2018
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Tea Time
At 3 AM my eyes snap open. It’s been about fifteen hours since my last fix, and I’m already edging into withdrawal. With a sigh I get out of bed and head down to the basement to make a cup of tea from my store of opium poppies.
October 2018
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Maintenance Boy
I worked weekend nights and a couple of afternoon shifts during the week. Sometimes I requested more hours just to get away from home. Being away meant I didn’t have to deal with the sadness that lingered in our house.
September 2018
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