I pulled the plug. It may as well have been a trigger, Says my heart; I closed the book myself, And cannot mourn. Some loss is irrevocable; Powerless, you cannot stop The truck, the bullet, Turn back time. Denial, anger, bargaining, Railing at life and death, Waves of grief, up and down, Washing. But some…
By a poor person. By any standard I’m poor. I make about $200 a month more than I pay in monthly rent. In a good month. I depend on government food stamps because I need a good chunk of that $200 for gas and insurance on my old, fuel-inefficient vehicle to take me to my…
Missed Part 1? Read it here. Larietta was a member of the large, old family, though neither she nor any other could have told you how. She grew up largely by her own devices, shuffled between convents and basement kitchens and the streets. When she blossomed into womanhood her fortunes turned, for a blacksmith’s apprentice…
I have lived my worst nightmare more than once. It’s just as bad as it sounds, and not. Anticipation holds more fear; fear holds more pain, and pain more grief, than the nightmares themselves. Even nightmare skies hold stars.
In the history of maligned generations, mine may be the most severely, relentlessly and unfairly maligned. It’s true that we move back in with our parents and that we don’t go to church, but it’s not all bad. Here are some things we Millennials get right. I’m not saying no previous generations understood these things……
And How Women have been Doing It for Millennia Just to be quite clear up front, I’m definitely a feminist. I think it’s ridiculous that women earn 70 cents to a man’s dollar and that in spite of making up half the country’s population we comprise only 17% of Congress. Women’s behavior and clothing is…
My father likes to tell stories about a certain soccer coach who gave pithy pieces of advice often applicable to life as much as to the game. One day the team was set to play against another school. The Brutes, as we will call them, were not really a soccer team; they usually played football…
Guilt: the most useless of human emotions. In general, I’m a real fan of emotions. Like pain, emotions act as signals that something is wrong and needs to change. People without emotions (or those who are out of touch with their emotions) have a hard time making good, healthy decisions; again, similarly to people who…
Once, long and far in the past, there was a very old and very large home that belonged to an even older and larger family. No one kept the home anymore; the last resident was only a fuzzy-edged memory, and he had been too lazy or too cowardly to leave it to any of his…
“You’re amazing!” “You’re so strong!” “I really admire you.” You’d think I would like hearing those things. Compliments, and compliments that don’t involve body parts, are good things, right? The truth is, I never quite know how to respond. When people say I’m amazing, it feels like they are setting me in a different category….
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