I got my first gerbil at age 10. They were exotic pets at the time, living primarily in the deserts of Asia. Where many school friends had hamsters, animals that are nocturnal, gerbils are daylight creatures. They are brown, fur covered, mouse-like rodents — but cuter — with long tails. When handling gerbils, you can harmlessly lift them by the base of their tail. I don’t remember from where we got him, but George came home for my birthday.
That summer I went to sleep away camp for the first time. During the month of July in 1969, I was at Camp Abelard in Upstate New York. Its predecessor was called Webatuck. A percentage of campers and staff that had been family at the abandoned grounds returned to what would now be called Abelard.…
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Before the men came through and struck her bald, my mother said, the mountain had been verdant. Green snakes had capered in shadows beneath great green oaks, beetles had squirmed in the wet cavities of overturned rocks. My mother said that there had been whitetail deer that had drunk from streams, that there had been bears in summer and coyotes in spring and turkeys in autumn. My mother told me that this had once been a land alive.
I do not know how true her stories were.
All I know is what I see when I crest the hill, through the arch of two great tree branches that have long been stripped of their leaves and their bark.
And what I see is thus:
Sitting alone atop a hill, behind a house that has raised generations, is the bald and sandy face of a carved-out mountain top.…
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During her omnipresence in the 1990s, Martha Stewart never did it for me. Of course, I knew of her and was very aware of who she was, but I rarely engaged with her celebrity, being somewhat turned off by her caricatured fussiness, whiteness, and wealth. To me, she epitomized a starched, bland Stepford Wives aesthetic that I thought would be stultifying. Without really knowing of her work, I thought she was exceedingly tasteful, to the point of being antiseptic. Though I was a huge consumer of cooking TV, I never warmed to her oeuvre, assuming her schtick would be too complicated and unattainable. I preferred by celebrity chefs to be chatty, accessible, and fun, like Rachael Ray or even Ina Garten. Martha Stewart would glide across the television screen, her frozen beauty akin to the White Witch from C.S.…
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You almost walked by me as you’d done many times before. What made you ask me for a dollar this time? Why did I stop to consider your blasé request? I was fickle with my handouts to the countless panhandlers in downtown Oakland. There was no pattern to my altruism, but I always carried a single dollar in my front pocket for the perfect, albeit erratic, tug on my conscience to dole it out.
You were one of the faces in the throng that was questionable; were you another unlucky destitute soul or a street hustler eager to swindle an easy handout into a bigger take? You had smooth black skin and indecipherable clothes: a tan jacket that could be second hand, dark baller sweatpants you might’ve snagged from a lost and found, and a grungy white and red ball cap with its tags still attached.…
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The first signs—paper lasted longer, printer cartridges didn’t fade, prelabeled files remained empty. It’s nothing, I thought. Every writer has such times. Word output isn’t everything. I’ve been thinking hard lately—that’s work too.
The next sign, only slightly more distracting, was the intermittent ache in my right arm. Had I slept on it the wrong way? Lugged that last heavy bag of groceries too far?
Then at my desk, I reached up toward the bookshelf and felt a sharp pang. Must have turned too quickly. But the pain wasn’t bad enough to seek treatment and became almost natural. I ignored the apparent coincidence that my arm hurt only when I reached to the bookshelf.
The discomfort increased, but I kept dismissing it and concentrated on more cerebral matters.…
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I would rather die of passion than of boredom.
Van Gogh
The Caribbean did a voodoo on me. Until I finally broke the spell, it held me in an iron grip – I had to include a trip to this part of the world in my repertoire at least once a year. My excuse to myself for spending so much money and time on going somewhere familiar while so much of the world lay unexplored was the plethora of different islands I could visit. But in reality, I was simply addicted to it.
I believe that every trip we make – even short and seemingly inconsequential ones – changes who we are, but the Caribbean can give anyone an acute existential crisis. My advice: don’t go there with your loved one.…
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I discovered Nirvana on classic rock radio during my early morning drives to work after Hurricane Katrina and the flooding from the breached levees decimated New Orleans in 2005. I’d completely missed the grunge wave in the 90s. Back then, I spent long days in a medical practice working with sick patients, stubborn insurance companies, and overworked hospital clinicians. In addition, I was dealing with infertility treatments that ended in disappointment after disappointment for a lot of the decade. I put more stress on myself by sneaking outside to smoke, an old habit I picked back up thinking it would calm me. Overwhelm was a dark cloud overhead as I struggled to cope.
Popular culture, including the hottest music of the time, wasn’t on my radar.…
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