the beauty of an ordinary life
Among our dead, returned ashes-to-ashes back to the earth, are family, friends, neighbors, four dogs, and a silver-coated cat who was blessed with canine disposition. The cat was a gift, delivered by silver Cadillac one summer afternoon, the last summer our checks came preprinted with 19___, when my tug-of-war between West and South hadn’t yet…
“I know you said you don’t want any of this, but I think you’ll actually want one thing,” he said, dropping some folded papers on the kitchen table.
It was a letter, five pages in long-hand, from my mother to my father, a few months before they married. When we had gathered the belongings from my mother’s garage years ago, the letter must have slipped from a box into an adjacent pile.
We rose before dawn, in the dead of winter, when the only light was the moon’s reflection on the Nebraska snow. We lived in a small, four-room guesthouse – a generous term, as the “guesthouse” was a two-story garage, the top half converted into living quarters: two bedrooms, each barely big enough for a bed,…
I’ve been thinking about getting a tattoo. If we know each other, in real life, then this revelation may be shocking. If we know each other very well, though, then it’s possibly not unexpected. I have been thinking about it, a tattoo, though not terribly seriously, for longer than I’ll admit, even here. Tattoos, like…
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
The still young-ish couple and their month-old baby are sitting in the small neighborhood Chinese restaurant on a chilly, dark October night. The restaurant is mostly a take-out and delivery hub, so most of the tables inside are empty. They have come here, this couple and their new baby, because it is close to their…
Did you ever ask Dad to help you learn how to ski? We were in the car heading back toward home, my son and I, having driven all the way from our midtown home to the faraway suburban tennis center, site of a Thursday afternoon school match, only to be notified right as we were…
I will tell this story poorly because it is late at night, and I have wrung every ounce from a beautiful spring weekend, and I am tired. But I will tell it anyway because a commitment is a commitment, even if only to myself (especially that). Someday I will come back and edit…. One day…
