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I like to picture my father, thirty years ago, standing in a half-built department store, with a hammer in one hand and a forty-five record in the other. The forty-five is Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walking.” My father is alone, it is early morning, and he is trying to decide what to do with the record, which he hates.
By Sybil SmithMay 1997In the spring, during long twilit evenings lengthening slowly into night, we watch our mothers change. The pink on the filters of their cigarettes matches the pink on their rounded fingernails. We think somehow this color signals s-e-x, but we don’t understand, and it makes us want to hate them.
By Anne DooleyApril 1997My father, though, seemed unaware of my contempt, and in June, as my high-school-graduation gift, he took me to Torremolinos, on the coast of Spain. He’d booked us a room at a midpriced, touristy hotel through some educator’s discount travel plan. We saw a bullfight. We swam.
By Andrew SchwartzMarch 1997Shortly before her stroke, she broke up with a lover younger than my brother and I. That was Mom. Born at home in Brooklyn during the Depression, she did group therapy with murderers by day, and by night maintained a small private psychiatric practice.
By Andrew RamerFebruary 1997After my father died in 1973, my grandmother put newspaper over all the first-floor windows at night. Sometimes I wonder if she was more afraid of looking out than of someone looking in. She’d wait until after the six o’clock news to do the chore.
By Mary CrossFebruary 1997She loathed weakness for the simple reason that it prevented one from seizing life’s opportunities. In her case, opportunity consisted of being born with a hundred thousand megawatts of pure drive and determination, and a father who pegged her early along as one of the Divine: a daddy who let her drive a car when she was twelve; a daddy who gave her a twenty-two-room mansion on Riverside Avenue for a wedding present; a daddy who adored her beyond all reason.
By Lorenzo W. MilamJanuary 1997Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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