Recently one of my children aggressively grabbed another, and, with much sincerity and enthusiasm, cried, “I love you!” The child on the receiving end, also with sincerity but with less enthusiasm, responded, “I don’t love you.” The loving child repeated the sentiment one more time, in case the unloving child had not really heard correctly, but the response remained adamant. I could relate to both of them—the loving one had ventured into what was for them a rare moment of openness and vulnerability, only to be rejected, while the unloving one had been terrorized by the loving one for the better part of a morning and was only stating what was, in that moment, a truth.
Love has never been simple concept to me. I come from a loving enough family, but not one that likes to express this love verbally.…
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July 2017. As we depart from O’Cebreiro and enter the forest that wends down into the Navia Valley, Lou casts her daily intention into the dimming stars.
“Today I walk for my mom,” she declares into the darkness.
S. and I acknowledge it silently as Lou’s mom materializes in my mind. If it is the village that raises the child, she is in every sense my auntie, my elder, my second mother. On the cusp of her retirement in January she had received an initial diagnosis of cancer, but the prognosis was only confirmed a week before Lou left to join me—her cancer is endemic. Chemotherapy will prolong her life, but never save it.
I look up through the dark arms of the Evergreen Oaks and Portuguese Oaks, marveling at the silent intelligence of the trees. …
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In the early 1990s on a frosty winter’s weekend, I attended an international school job fair at Queen’s University. I had only been teaching in Canada for a few years, but there had been a freeze on salary for teachers in the Province of Ontario. I had taken loans to return to university to complete my Honours Bachelor of English & Drama degree. Due to the pay freeze, I wondered how many years it would take me to pay off those loans, that seemed to hang over my head like the Sword of Damocles. I drove from London Ontario, where I was living and working, to Kingston, and the attractive Queen’s University campus. I was nervous and excited at one and the same time at the prospect of possibly being hired to teach at an international school.…
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When I was eight, I developed a theory: if I were a boy, my mother would like me. I found, on a crumpled summer camp form under a school bus seat, a question about whether “your daughter” knew about menstruation or had menstruated. I’d never heard the term (I was in fourth grade but in 1966) so I asked the bus driver what it meant. He turned red and told me to ask my mother. I persisted; he refused to answer. My mother gasped, “You asked the bus driver?” She offered an account of which I understood little except “never speak of this with your brother.” Babies and blood seemed to be involved. At the dinner table, I brought up both, plus the new word, which I pronounced “menyoustration.”…
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I have an unhealthy obsession with the act of brewing coffee in my Mr. Coffee electric drip coffee machine. Why do I prefer this method to a single-serving Keurig or buying coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts or Starbucks on the way to work?
For one, nostalgia tugs at me, as I remember my deceased parents and how they taught me how to make coffee. When I was young, my dad worked as a salesman at the local Sears store, while my mom started her banking career on the teller line. They were low-income earners, but they never scrimped on the staple of coffee. There was always a canister of coffee and an electric drip coffee maker sitting on the Formica countertop in our kitchen (and in their separate residences after they divorced).…
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Here in the Midwest, mystery is called lack, and adventure, lost. The Midwest, where questions become an arrow through the eye, and she must because she must because she must.
In Mary Henrietta Peters’ diary of Wednesday, January 5, 1927, while living in Iowa, she wrote, “… got a letter from Aulden he is all settled now W L & Vean B butchered a beef to day Cora Rothlisberger tryed to comit suside this morning about 4 oclock.
Sparse lanes and ordinary scenes. We’d lie if we said we didn’t tire of it. But gone are the gremlins of urban darkness, the noise and topics of debate roiling under umbrellas of revolt. We rarely miss them now, the roiling, the revolts, the rhetoric and the reasoning.…
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I turned eighteen on a Sunday in September 1978, when the infamous German angel of death landed next to us on Broadway Boulevard in Yonkers, New York, as we went on our way to have a Chinese dinner for my birthday.
Our 1965 red Chevrolet Impala, sheathed in steel like a Sherman tank, was ancient compared to every other car we passed on the road that evening, though it still had enough American energy and spunk to wage an attack on the recently minted yellow Volkswagen Beetle idling beside us at the stop light.
Dad was a stoic driver, dying from a slowly growing tumor; mom, quiet in the back seat, worn down from taking care of my ailing father. Both too old, too infirm, and too tired to capture or kill a Nazi, even one as notorious as the malignant evil we encountered while cruising down a tranquil suburban street in the purple twilight of that fading summer.…
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