The barista looks back up at me, Sharpie aloft over a half-caf venti soy latte. “Megan?” There have been times when I’ve allowed myself the small joy of just telling the barista: Yes. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes, my name is Megan! And what is yours? By your nametag I’m guessing Tyler? Tyler, isn’t that nice, isn’t that a blessing, such simple names as ours? And then we would rejoice, Tyler and I, in the ease of it all.
American English has so many colloquialisms; expressions that have been grandfathered into our conversation. As busy as a one-armed paperhanger. He looks like he was rode hard and put away wet. It beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. I could go on, but why? Whenever any of us wants to compare the task at hand to something so amazingly complicated that mere mortals should not even think about attempting it, we say, “Well, it’s not like […]
Walking down the street, people stare at me. I’ve been in Taiwan for over one year and I still haven’t gotten used to the staring. I know I’m different. I’m a black female with a short Afro, tall frame, broad shoulders, no makeup. I just have to accept that people will want to take a longer, curious look. And sometimes still be confused by what they see. My first day at my school, a fourth grader asks: “Are you a […]
It is 9pm. It is 9pm, and I’m jogging through a graveyard in the middle of New Hampshire. It is 9pm, and I am optimizing my time by using this time to think about what I will do tomorrow to optimize that time. I decide I will wake up at 4am. I will wake up at 4am, and that will not be a problem because I will be starving (having dreamt of nothing but peanut butter and pork roast). So, […]
The morning of my first day of high school I sat in an auditorium with about 300 other freshmen boys. There were going to be a lot of speeches from a lot of Jesuits. First, an older priest with beige hair came striding out onstage. He had a kind of JFK look about him. He meant business. He said, “Boys, we have a motto at Saint Xavier High School. Men For Others. What’s most important to us is that you learn […]
It all started the year I quit medical school. Actually, I flunked out of medical school. I got Fs in four out of six classes and my scholarship was gone. Poof! So there I was, kicked out onto the cold cement steps of this prestigious university, barely a nickel to my name, and I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. But I did know that I wanted to be with my girlfriend, Diane. Now Diane […]
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.”
