I’m built like a mullet. Business in the front, party in the back. What is it about an awkward ten-or-eleven-year-old that screams, “please call attention to my body?” That was the time when my body started developing; my family fretted that I might be swaybacked and admonished me to stand up straight. At dances, the [...]
I’m knitting a shawl out of fire-colored Madelinetosh yarn, and when I say “Fire-colored,” I don’t mean orange, I mean the shawl looks like it is on fire and made of lasers. I don’t think much of the fact that I knit, now, or that I could, technically, sew something (something rectangular, that is), or [...]
I grew up in a 1984 Cadillac Coupe de Ville. The Cadillac was once the American car’s American car, a car designed for riding cross-country highways like Route 66 in comfort, and the Coupe de Ville was the last model before Cadillac started downsizing and redesigning its iconic lines. I remember when my grandfather bought [...]
I’m walking into the kitchen at my grandfather’s house, and my uncle Charles is there, watching TV on the little color set on the tiled counter. He’s watching the new Ken Burns documentary, and I’m preparing to slowly edge out of the room, because The Civil War (Parts 1-199) nearly robbed me of my will [...]
Once, I spent my weekends in a tiny, cramped, cluttered apartment in Cal’s married student housing. A certain Phd student in rhetoric, Mark — who, implausibly, had custody of three little girls from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon — made a point of opening our My-Little-Pony-addled minds to culture. On Saturday morning, we’d wake to [...]
It was unseasonably hot. That must have been the reason my grandmother walked down the aging basement stairs and out of the open garage door and traveled a block to the corner store, holding my three-year-old hand in hers. The giddy excitement of the moment still stays with me; the black night sky, like a [...]
This is how to make collard greens. First, my grandfather drives his truck to the Alemany Farmer’s Market. My grandfather chooses a bunch of taut, bitter leaves, and he puts money in the dirt-caked, stubby-fingered hand of the farmer who planted the seeds, and he brings home the collards to my grandmother to cook. But [...]
