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).…
...continue reading
I guess I hadn’t been paying too close attention. One day everything was normal, the next it seemed as if Woody had aged 30 years. His eyes were as bright as ever, but most of his hair had turned grey overnight. His walk was much slower and his taste for any type of food had all but disappeared. Then one night I noticed he completely ignored his favorite meal of steak and baked potato, preferring to just veg out on the couch. It was obvious that things were far from being right. He had stopped communicating in his normal fashion and all of his movements had a slow, almost exaggerated, motion. He didn’t moan or complain, just slept a lot and didn’t move too much. I had seen these signs too many times to ignore them.…
...continue reading
Most everything gleamed because gleam means clean and hospitals are supposed to be clean. I’d finished with the tests but my doctor wouldn’t let me leave. That’s a bad sign and he knew it but he couldn’t reel it back, so in some sort of med-school compensation he offered a nicer room. I jumped on the deal but the room, as hospital rooms go, was a bit bigger but not any nicer, so I went for a walk. He allowed it, but only after saying not too far. And the bad signs just kept coming.
I left to look for the cafeteria, not because I was hungry, just curious if it gleamed like everything else. In the hallway white scrubs jostled toward me and I asked for directions.…
...continue reading
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.…
...continue reading
When Mina scrubbed a dirty toilet bowl, she didn’t think: shit. When she changed sheets with islands of stains or tossed wastebaskets with snotty tissues and bloody tampons, she didn’t think: disgusting. She just did her job, her mind elsewhere—which was why, throwing open the curtains in one of the rooms at the end of her shift and seeing the parking lot covered with snow, the in-ground pool a large white postage stamp, she was only mildly surprised.
In the hallway, she asked Renata how long it had been snowing, and Renata, wringing out her mop, said, “You no see? All day long.”
Some of Renata’s mop water splashed out of the bucket. Her black eyes flared, lips flattened.
“Good night,” Mina said. “See you tomorrow.”…
...continue reading
After our argument I’m not ready to
be the one to make the first move
back to our comfort station
but I did buy a bag of your
beloved M & M’s
believing we will have sweet again
still my anger keeps me naming the
M’s in the waiting bag
monsters and morons
manipulators and mangles
manners and maturity
monkeys and manatees
then I remember how
thrilled you were to show me
the monkey you found
hugging the tree
I remember snorkeling together
giddily discovering the manatee
playing with his mother so close
to our hand holding space
is that you I hear coming
to my closed door
have an M & M
my most maddening
marvelous much-loved
magical man
– Susan Shea…
...continue reading
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.…
...continue reading