A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
Because I was born at the tail end of the 1970s, I can remember a time when the default settings for luggage didn’t involve wheels. Instead, you had to carry your suitcase by a handle. And the valise, to use a grandparental term, would be constructed out of sturdy materials that made the item weigh, […]
According to an essay I once read, the U.S. electorate tends to select a president because he’s perceived as having some crucial quality that makes up for something his predecessor lacked. So, for example, we have Joe Biden now because he seemed eager to unify the nation after the divisive Trump era. And we had […]
The zip code in my hometown of Springdale, Arkansas, is 72764. Not long ago, one of my sisters gave me a T-shirt with those numbers spelled out on the front. I assume she was trying to help prevent me from forgetting where I came from. When you move away from somewhere, forgetting where you came […]
I had trouble telling time when I was a kid. The whole short-hand/long-hand, numbers-in-a-circle system struck me as prohibitively complicated. I knew you were supposed to glance at your wristwatch or a wall clock and instantly recognize that it was 3:47 or whatever, but it always took me a few too many ticks of the […]
My husband, Frank, and I recently took a guided bike tour of Boston. Somebody gave us a gift certificate for the experience when we were leaving New York. The second I mounted my ride, I told the wiry woman leading the tour that the seat felt too high, but she thought it looked fine and […]
I’m currently on my second passport. I got my first one in 2004 in order to travel to Italy with my family. I still remember the photo inside because I looked wild-eyed and slightly deranged—sort of like Jack Nicholson in The Shining when he uses an ax to chop his way through that bathroom door and […]
While I was in college, I wrote a very meta, very pretentious, very bad play called That Day This Day. It’s about Adam, a gay man from the South (ahem) whose coming-out to his family didn’t go well (ahem, ahem), so now he’s restaging the episode with a cast of his own choosing in order to […]
With only a few exceptions, the toys belonging to my dog, Lucy, are made of cloth with squeakers inside. She had some plastic toys in her youth, but she would gnaw on them until she broke them up into little pieces. I was worried she’d swallow one of those bits and choke. So now her […]
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 […]
This presidential campaign season is the sixth one I’ve lived through since reaching voting age. So far, I have chosen the winning candidate only twice—Barack Obama in 2008 and again in 2012. My selections in 2000 and 2016 (Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, respectively) won the most votes, but for some reason that doesn’t ensure […]
Indirect Objects 