Timbuktu. When I was four, I loved the way the name tripped off my tongue. This word bouquet coincided with my first ice cream sandwich which was gloriously mysterious, even without the added intrigue of coming from a vending machine.

Timbuktu. A name layered in gra… Read full post »

Last month, in Complicity, I wrote how infuriated I became when confronted with a white woman who shared with me her unsolicited world view: “They can’t follow instructions….Black people.”  The second to last paragraph garnered angry let/… Read full post »

Those people. Them. They.

Mob mentality is viscerally frightening. Even if played out on the flat surface of the television, the sight of people running amok, smashing windows, storefronts, setting buildings, cars, themselves sometimes on fire, is enough to set my fi… Read full post »

So I have rabies.  My children are probably rabid as well.  At least this is what everyone, and I mean everyone, has told me.  This is the problem with having too much information—the ability to assess risk goes out the window and you find yourself weighing matters in fis/… Read full post »

Irony is a bitch.  Or maybe, after all, it’s the male equivalent. 

In mid August I took my two youngest children 17 and 13 to Disney World for two days and then on to my cousin’s house in Boca Raton.  Many of my friends who don’t own televisions we… Read full post »

I am constantly trying to suppress a genetic predisposition.  Not to alcoholism or drug or gambling addiction (thank god).  My grandmother only smoked or drank during bridge parties and my mom quit smoking by simply dumping the rest of the carton of Kents/… Read full post »

When Jane Goodall disappeared at four, her mother did not frantically grab a GPS device or swallow a biting urge to “chip” her little girl when she finally found her in the chicken coop five hours later observing hens. In fact, local police were not even cal… Read full post »

When I was nine I lost my hand.  In some accident.  How, wasn’t really the point.  I was still going to manage with my prosthetic.  I wore the same chipper determination when I went blind earlier that spring, memorizing my house by counting stairs and feeling c/… Read full post »

It’s the story no one wants to hear.  That’s what the kind but firm support group psychologists told me over the phone or in person.  I wasn’t ever a member of a support group, mind you.  In each case I was trying to get in and, in fact,… Read full post »

My four children are separated like knots on a ropey timeline, equidistant, exactly three and half years between each.  They are also separated by gender: girl, boy, girl, boy. And by race: white Hispanic, w/… Read full post »

Why keep it all these years?

This is what I think I’ll ask later, much later, when I am old and have long forgotten the little basket tucked in my bottom drawer.  A small soft oval of straw knots no larger than a jewelry box, woven along the/… Read full post »