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Reading Between The Lines

How Compulsory Schooling Has Failed Us

Modern schooling is a kind of religion. Its goal is most certainly not to teach reading, writing, arithmetic, and thinking, although sometimes learning happens because teachers — and even administrators — don’t realize the kind of enterprise in which they are engaged. But this does not happen too often.

Triumphs

Trophies, embroidery classes, office hours

The Game Of High School

Bob Penny, voted Most Self-Absorbed Hunk by a committee of me, said, I am in my big-boob period, as he pretended to swoon over Lisa Belia. I took his remark to be of the making-me-jealous variety. I didn’t even have to pretend to ignore it, because I was in love with you.

Judgment Day At Saint Ann’s

On Being Beautiful

I’m beautiful. It’s lasted quite a long time, this beauty of mine, but it won’t be lasting much longer because I’m forty now, as I’m writing this, forty now and probably by the time you read it forty-one, and so on and so forth, and we all know it ends up as worms or ashes, but for the time being I’m still beautiful.

Burt Osborne Rules The World

All day long, on that day in the sixth grade when my life changed forever and the world became a better place, everything had been smelling and tasting like overcooked eggs.

No One Said How It Would Be

My mother’s hair turned in two weeks from chestnut, as she called it, to shocking white. “I am shocking white,” she said that morning when I came into the kitchen, awakened by the smell of toast.

Sunbeams

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

Jules Renard

The Impossible

A prescient daughter, an exhausted and drained nurse, an unlikely marathon runner

The Corner Store

A man in a stained shirt and dirty brown pants stumbles out of a mud-brick building, fiddling with his zipper. Giggling, but sober, he shuts his fly and fishes a cigarette from his breast pocket. Approaching a woman grilling brochettes over a fire, he places a hand on her thigh and swipes a skewer of meat from the grill. The woman doesn’t move or speak, just clucks her tongue disapprovingly.