-
My Coming Out Story
When I moved to the house I’m living in, I made a decision. I would throw open my blinds, my heart, and my life to the outside passing-by world. No more hiding behind fears of being seen. I would challenge myself. I would join the rest of the world. For keeps. Every day, I see the same people walking by. Sunglassed mothers pushing jogging strollers. The old woman in the plaid shirt-coat who walks as if she’s recovering from a stroke. The Steve Martin lookalike who wears the same royal blue shirt and iPod earbuds every day. The runner who sprints upright down the middle of the street, first this…
-
Dear Anne LaMott
DISCLOSURE: I suspect I, uh, stole the idea for writing a letter to Anne LaMott from Andy Raskin. Oh, you don’t know Andy Raskin? I didn’t either until about a week ago when his book The Ramen King and I went home with me from the library. I suppose I would have known him if I still listened to NPR — where, apparently, Andy Raskin talks about things — but I haven’t listened to NPR since at least 2005, and in fact the listening to NPR, especially Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion (though I saw the movie — was that cheating?) was ceded to the Other Side in my…
-
I Hate Your Dog
Somewhere along the way I must have offended the Dog Gods, because dogs and I have had a hate-hate relationship all my life. And when I say I hate dogs, I don’t mean just any dog. I mean your dog. Dogs have been pissing me off since I was a little kid. When I was three I remember walking down the block from the babysitter’s to the corner candy store to pick up a pack of candy cigarettes. I hated the flavor of these cigarettes — they were a horrid spearmint monstrosity with a powdery coating of cornstarch, not exactly kid-friendly if you ask me — but I adored sucking…
-
Unveiling
Two posts in one day! See if you can hold down the excitement.
-
What I Really Need Is A Good Operatic Soundtrack
Well! So I can write Poignant and Painful! Isn’t that just made of awesome? But! There’s more than one way to skin a cat, which means, well, ew. What do you do with a cat skin anyway? It’s far too small to make anything useful out of. A hat, maybe? A cat hat would be sort of cool. Here, pussy! As long as it’s not the skin of a cat you actually know. That would just be sort of wrong, except maybe as a tribute. You could keep your cat’s head on the skin and wear the hat so it looks like there’s your head, and then there’s your dead…
-
Local Color
I’ve always enjoyed the places I’ve lived, at least until the worms began crawling out of the woodwork and infiltrating my brain with messages of malaise, causing me to long for U-Haul boxes and the feel of newspaper-wrapped dishes in my hands (I am very good at packing, ask anyone). But no place I’ve lived — and there have been many — has given me the utter joy I feel these days when I step out my front door and face west and the water and the sky and the islands beyond. Oh no, I take that back. Colorado did that, too. The nightly sight of the Front Range silhouetted…
-
I’ll Have To Keep My Post Titles Short Now
I wrote this about a week ago: About a year ago, I drove out of one world and into another. I thought then that I had left certain aspects of the old world behind, but I failed to see the invisible trailer attached to my black Honda CR-V, the one carrying the pieces of who I had been. When I started writing here I wrote as if that trailer didn’t move the 3000 miles along with me, as if it was just The New Me here, the one that didn’t feel as if it had walked out of the two-dimensional world of a Mother’s Day card. In the past year…
-
Sitting Shiva
They say that caring for the dead body of a loved one is the most intimate act a human can perform. ~~~~ I drove home in silence today. It was two hours of after-airport surreality, the shotgun seat and the back seat now oddly silent after having been so full for the last ten days. I came home to the smell of bacon frying, the love of a man wafting to greet me at the front door, trying to fill the holes in my heart left vacant by the two who now occupied seats 27A and 27B headed back to humid-hell Pennsylvania after ten days of forest trails and waterside…
-
Boxes
There’s a box I live in sometimes. My box is just my size. Like a casket. I lie inside it, feeling its smooth wooden sides, feeling safe. Inside my box it’s just me. I was nine when I found the box. Every night I’d lie awake inside it, breathing carefully through the air holes someone had put in it, feeling the rocking motion of the waves. Every night I’d lie inside the box set adrift on the ocean, always landing on an island where there was an evil wizard who did unspeakable things to me. The box lasted at least through fifth grade. That was the year my stomach hurt…
-
Pink
I have a new thing for pink. No idea where this comes from. For years, pink was right up there as Most Hated Color in the Universe. Possibly because I was surrounded by it: my walls were an insipid shade of pastel pink, my ruffled bedspread was sort of a washed-out salmon color, and even my rug was pink. There’s a photo of me as a wee thing, lying on that pink rug, nose in a book, wearing something plaid. Oh yes, 1970 was a great year for interior design. Pink clothes were out. I allowed my body to be clad in drab plaidish kneelength dresses with Peter Pan collars,…