A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
When I was a kid back in Arkansas, snow wasn’t unheard of, but it was always an event bordering on the miraculous. The heavens would open up and make the view from my bedroom window look like a Christmas card, and somehow that meant I got a brief reprieve from long division. It was enough […]
Back when we still lived in Chicago, my husband, Frank, came home from a street market one day with a stack of square ceramic coasters bearing ghostly photo collages depicting sites of regional interest. There’s a coaster each for the North Side’s Andersonville area, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Goodman Theatre, Evanston’s Northwestern University (my […]
In a literature course I took during college, the instructor once drew a parallel between The Odyssey of Homer and The Wizard of Oz. Each tale, he explained, centers on a protagonist (Odysseus/Dorothy) who takes a magical journey, relying on the assistance of one supernatural figure (Athena/Glinda) and plagued by the opposition of another (Poseidon/the Wicked Witch […]
Do you find that you grow less lactose-tolerant as the years roll on? It seems astonishing to me that during my adolescence I would start the day with a large glass of milk accompanied by a milk-filled bowl of cereal and not need to spend all of first period doubled over in agony. The past […]
A calendar is a hopeful purchase, what with all the empty spaces full of possibilities and the tacit assumption that the buyer will survive through December. I usually select a wall calendar among whatever’s on the clearance rack in January. I would prefer for the monthly images to be dog-related, but in the past I’ve […]
I was born in August 1979, so all but the first four months of my first decade on earth were spent in the 1980s. Consequently, I have nostalgic feelings for hairspray. The same goes for the Smurfs and anti-Soviet sentiment. I recall two notable encounters with the latter attitude during my prepubescent years. When I […]
This year’s Christmas tree came with a ribbon tied to one of the branches identifying the tree as a “North Carolina Fraser fir.” So I named it Treena Simone in honor of North Carolinian Nina Simone. Granted, the High Priestess of Soul wasn’t the holly-jolly type of entertainer we typically associate with the December holidays. […]
My husband, Frank, and I let our dog, Lucy, sleep on the bed with us at night. She prefers to stay on top of the covers, curling up in one of the valleys created in the topography of the bedspread by the humans lying underneath. I like the warm weight of her cuddling except when […]
At the Southern Baptist megachurch my family attended when I was growing up, you were supposed to bring your own Bible to services, which were held Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, and Wednesday evenings—and that doesn’t even count Sunday school, choir practice, youth group, and periodic revival meetings. Not to mention the daily Bible classes and […]
When my parents dropped me off at college, my mom gave me a laundry basket. Taped to the bottom were instructions, written in my mother’s perfect penmanship, for properly washing and drying clothes—tasks I had never attempted up to that point. I no longer have the cheat sheet, but, as I recall, its author was […]
Indirect Objects 