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Marriage
Sy Safransky’s Notebook
March 2015
After being married to Norma for thirty-one years, I still have such sexy dreams about her. This morning I considered waking Norma to finish what my dream Norma had started.
March 2015Fiction
The Full Eighty-Eight
They were living off Floreta’s pay now. Money was tight, but it had always been that way, forty years of never catching up. If they ever did get a little bit ahead, something always happened: a recession, a car crash, a broken bone, an illness.
March 2015
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
There Is No Secret
The peculiar thing about adulthood is that eventually you discover there is no such thing as adulthood. There are only best guesses and increasingly permanent results.
March 2015
Readers Write
First Love
A shoebox full of correspondence, a birthday party magician, summer camp
March 2015
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Bloodlines
A marriage can be many things. Ours was a series of secrets and small betrayals, little lies that poison you like an odorless gas you don’t even know you’re breathing until you stop.
March 2015
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
What You Don’t Know For Certain
In the middle of the night there are no answers, not even any suitable questions. Lie dumbstruck in the enormous space of that unknowing. Try to see your part in this. Stand at the mirror and comb through a list of possibilities: not smart enough, not romantic enough. You have known rejection, but its teeth were never this long or this sharp.
March 2015
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Apartment 5
It was snowing that morning as we left for church, the white sky spitting flakes, enough to dust the car but not enough to cover the dirty snow at the side of the road, the bare patches of dead lawn. It was January in Ames, Iowa, when snow no longer has its fluffy Christmas novelty and simply becomes another cold, hard fact of life.
February 2015
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Stars And Moons And Comets
Is there something wrong with me that I don’t seem as bereft as some widows, that I’m handling it so well? That’s what everyone says: “You are handling it so well.” I know he is dead. I just can’t believe we will be separated forever. Whoever wrote, “Till death do us part,” didn’t know what he was talking about.
December 2014
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