We use cookies to improve our services and remember your choices for future visits. For more information see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
We use cookies to improve our services and remember your choices for future visits. For more information see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Frank Sinatra, a .45 handgun, the Gettysburg Address
By Our ReadersJuly 2008Our failing family farm had two trailer homes sitting vacant. To make ends meet, my parents rented one to Valerie, a pregnant, unwed twenty-three-year-old with tomato red hair who worked at the Kroger deli, where my mother was the manager.
By Doug CrandellJuly 2008My mother lives on the tenth floor of a high-rise that overlooks New York Harbor from a New Jersey bluff. She leaves only to shop, to return half of what she has bought, and to eat lunch at the Quick Check. She has not been hiking or on lichen or lichen-adjacent since before I knew she had a vagina. Her adventures are happy hours in the penthouse bar, where she counts the freighters and container ships with Al, a retired sea captain.
By Austin BunnJune 2008The first time I read my dad’s diary, I was home for a weeklong midsummer visit. I had been wandering around my parents’ house, typically directionless, looking for something to do. My mom was at work, and my dad — who wasn’t at work, since he didn’t work — was out back sipping a Milwaukee’s Best and reading a book.
By Rachel YoderMay 2008The door to my mother’s apartment at the assisted-living facility is unlocked, so I enter. The Steinway, silent and black, takes up most of the living room. In the second bedroom — where she keeps her electric piano, painting supplies, and a daybed — the radio plays classical music. It’s nine in the morning, and the blinds have not yet been raised, but there’s light enough for me to see my mother lying on her side on the daybed in her ruby-colored robe.
By Pat MacEnultyMay 2008My mother, my stepfather, my five-year-old brother, and I lived in a sunny three-room tenement in Brooklyn, New York. The walls of our foyer were lined floor to ceiling with my mother’s books, and I read as many as possible, entering a trancelike state in which everything else floated on the edges of my awareness.
By Michelle Cacho-NegreteApril 2008My father and I were on the third tee at Wildwood Golf Course when a boy in a red golf shirt stepped from behind an oak tree next to the ball washer. “Mind if I join you?” he asked.
By Mark BrazaitisApril 2008We had been preparing for months, slowly ridding ourselves of possessions we had once thought essential. By the time we left, everything that was ours fit into three brown vinyl suitcases. My parents told me this would be enough, but, like so much they said, these words of comfort were not particularly plausible. Still, there was consolation. On our last day in Russia, as the fall of 1979 slid into winter, my brother Viktor lost his piano.
By Aharon LevyMarch 2008A double-roof shot, an against medical advice form, a pair of champagne flutes
By Our ReadersMarch 2008Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today