Funny how memory works like that, how we can go on in our lives, remembering some things but able to cancel out the times that you’d prefer to not remember until – bam – you’re riffling through some papers and are reminded that there was a time you made some very bad choices. I bought those tickets to Hawaii, and I bought them because my boyfriend had no money. I thought he had money about seven months earlier, when we […]
I’m five and my swim class group is three levels below “Guppy.” While others are “Swordfish” and “Stingrays,” my day camp doesn’t even give us an aquatic creature name: we are “Basic Beginner – non-swimmers.” I visualize myself in “Pre-Guppy” or maybe one day “Guppy,” and eventually “Starfish.”But my little body won’t float or retain heat long enough to stay in the water for an entire swim lesson. I cling to pool gutters during swimming lessons and birthday pool parties, […]
When the phone rang I leapt across the room, a dolphin breaking the surface before my nosedive back toward the cordless telephone in my parents’ kitchen. “Hello,” I answered. I was calm. I was nonchalant. I was a boy in the middle of puberty. “Hey,” the voice on the other end said. “It’s Amanda.”
Excerpted from the book Mozos: A Decade Running with the Bulls of Spain I woke at dawn when an officer kicked my foot and walked away laughing. Laborers finished standing and securing the barricades fifty yards away. I wandered to Telefónica, the section of the bull run course near the bull ring. Beautiful young Spanish women swept past by the hundreds. I stood in the center of the street as they passed. I met eyes with them, told them bonita. Some […]
I was eight years old and running for my life. I sped into the men’s bathroom, opened a stall door, and hid. “She isn’t allowed in here,” I thought to myself, “She can’t get me in here.” Four years earlier, my mother first had her way with me. It was a children’s fashion show at our Thai temple. She dressed me up as a young girl from the hill tribes of Northern Thailand. She attacked my four-year-old boy cheeks with blush, applied […]
“I cannot believe,” I announce to my mother and father from the back seat of the car, “that there will be a live donkey at church today.” We are driving to the small Quaker meetinghouse my family has attended for nearly two decades. When I was a child, I was a wise man in the pageant for three years running. I wore a maroon choir robe, a paper crown, and a garland of crumbled tinsel, saved and reused like it really […]
The pregnancy was lovely. John and I were more in love than ever. I wore my girlfriends’ hand-me-down maternity clothes, craved apples and apple juice and applesauce. I read Louise Erdrich’s memoir about early motherhood and What to Expect When You’re Expecting. I would be lying propped up in bed reading when John came home, he would tell about his day, and the baby would start to kick at the sound of his father’s voice. Every. Single. Time. We celebrated […]
I lost my mother when I was 15. I don’t mean that’s when she died – I mean that’s when she stopped being my mom. My parents’ tortured marriage had finally ended, and my mother wanted my three sisters and I to choose sides. When I refused she chose for me, leaving any parenting I was going to get to my father. For a variety of reasons, I couldn’t live with my dad. So I stayed with my mom, but […]
It’s December. A cab driver picks me up on my way home from a friend’s Christmas party. The driver of Yellow Cab medallion number 4520 spends the next several miles trying to coerce me to sleep with him after his shift ends at midnight, in just 20 minutes. I tell him no and change the subject, again and again. He persists. A sign in front of the passenger seat tells me his cab number and directs passengers to report incidents […]
