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,…
Now here we are at summer’s sun-stand, the long solstice (in the northern hemisphere, anyway) of June, fruit of a cycle born six months ago at the onset of winter. It’s still an anything-can-happen era with a why-the-hell-not vibe. It’s the time to ask, again: If not now, then when?
There are few, if any, things as full of pure joy as the squeals of bubbly delight from a baby playing peek-a-boo. When my son was little, long before he could walk, this was an instant and endless source of entertainment, closing my hands over my face, opening them like doors, and saying, “peek-a-boo; I…
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…
After her fifth or sixth miscarriage, my mother, resigned to the reality that a baby might not be in the cards, went with my father to the animal shelter and came home with a puppy. Without much debate they named the small, black-and-white ball of fur Happy, partly because the dog’s mouth was shaped in…
The “sea of red” at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Nebraska holds just enough magic that one single visit, on a bright, clear game day, could sway even the most resistant football hold-out, namely me. The stadium, seats brimming with scarlet sweaters, is exponentially more impressive in person than on television. It is a spectacle that…
