A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
During the summers of my childhood when my parents signed me up for baseball (contrary to my wishes, talents, and fragile sense of self-worth), my triumphs on the field and in the batter’s box were small in number. I was scared of the ball, couldn’t throw, couldn’t hit, and, frankly, didn’t have the firmest grasp […]
I learned of my maternal grandmother’s death while I was on a ghost tour at Lizzie Borden’s house in Fall River, Massachusetts. Don’t worry—a ghost didn’t tell me. My mom did, by cell phone. I was taking the tour as part of an assignment for my job as a travel editor. Ordinarily, I don’t court […]
This blog turned 4 years old on August 6. Tradition dictates that I devote the annual anniversary post to the Virgilian lottery, a form of soothsaying where you open Virgil’s works at random and whatever passage you land on tells your fortune. I consulted the lottery, using my copy of Robert Fagles’s 2006 translation of […]
When I was a kid, my parents put up a big bulletin board on one of the walls in my bedroom. It was probably 5 feet wide and 3 feet tall. Or maybe 6 feet wide and 4 feet tall? The thing was huge. I don’t know what prompted this design choice, but I went […]
My second grade teacher, Mrs. Lawrence, insisted that students continue wearing winter coats during recess until the first day of spring, no matter how warm the weather got before then. This was in Arkansas, where winter usually ends in February. By early March we were red-faced and sweating out on the playground, but Mrs. Lawrence […]
Of the historic homes I toured during family vacations as a child (we really knew how to have a good time), I can remember precisely one thing about each site. According to the Monticello website, Thomas Jefferson had two dumbwaiters installed in the dining room for the purpose of bringing up bottles from the wine […]
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, […]
I shampoo my hair every two to three days. I used to wash it daily but then someone convinced me that was too much. Apparently I was putting my hair at risk of becoming dry and brittle. My hairstylist at the time and several other anti-‘poo proselytizers made the case for infrequent washing, but the […]
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 […]
Indirect Objects 