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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You would never choose Cliff as your landlord, but our favorite gifts come unbidden.
This particular gift stood six feet, five inches, a pink behemoth with a Chow-Chow named Nugget. With a sweet tooth for the absurd and little to lose, he had purchased a farmhouse connected to the Eastbrook Post Office. Nearly every wall dripped with feral murals of vines and birds, cave paintings from a former resident without restraint. Spattered Spanish tile formed a yellow-brick labyrinth, and all the closets were the color of asparagus. Cliff would chop the house into four apartments. The USPS would pay him rent.
For $800/month including utilities, it would be my first home out of grad school.
Cliff was breathless the day I met him, a condition I would learn was his default.…
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In the earnest 1990s, I ran with a pack of good boys who aced AP Physics and fancied themselves feral.
The sincerest member of the stable, with the straightest laces and the thinnest wrists, owned no fewer than ten NO FEAR shirts.
Geriatric millennials remember these vividly: atop the image of some apex predator with its mouth open, were the words, red in tooth and claw: NO FEAR.
These shirts were evergreen on Sam, but they overtook his stick-insect frame in January. This was when I decreed our Banish Winter Campaign, a faintly successful annual attempt to get my best friends to wear their brightest colors each Monday.
But my three best friends, as soft-spoken spokeswolf Sam explained, were boys. And boys. Didn’t. Wear. Bright. Colors.…
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It’s a classy joint. There are white cloth napkins and real glasses. It’s a sharp contrast to the obscene plastic cups of frozen liquor and paper towel grease mops that’ve defined my Bourbon Street experience the last two days. I’m taking a gentlemanly sip of my Sazerac as my appetizer arrives. Boudin balls are fried crisp, stuffed with alligator blood sausage and rice, sort of a bayou arancini.
The upscale nature of the restaurant doesn’t redeem me. I can remember everything about the dancer last night, except her name. I table an interrogation of my post-strip-club self-loathing, trying not to think about it, which only means that I do. I look at my phone and the faces of the other diners, feeling out of place here sitting under the chandeliers, but the rye is helping.…
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It was a blue-sky summer evening and I bounced on my heels and grinned. At seventy, I had finally made it to Paris. My husband and I eagerly waited in line to climb the Eiffel Tower. But the line wasn’t moving.
“I’m hungry,” I said, hoping for a view from the restaurant on the second level.
“Me too,” said Steve. “We’ll be up there just in time for sunset.”
At the ticket window, a Middle Eastern family waved their arms in the air. Nearby, a handful of Japanese tourists milled around wearing puzzled expressions. Then a man in a business suit appeared, shouting first in English, then other languages.
“The Tower is closed temporarily! You may wait at least an hour here or proceed to the exit!”…
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