I was chatting with a colleague last week about raising a boy with attention deficit disorder, and all the challenges that come in that package, and how it looks when the boy becomes an adult man and starts making his own decisions about important things in his life. Or at least how it looks in … Continue reading Parenting Story: Difficult Children, Interesting People
Morning Miniature 3.30.19
Light snow fell through the tall conifers all around him; a single flake caught on his eyelashes, and here came others, settling on his nose and cheeks. When he’d first struck out the sun was still high in the sky, with only a few gathering clouds. Now he’d been drifting in and out of consciousness, … Continue reading Morning Miniature 3.30.19
Morning Miniature 3.28.19
Lucy didn’t drive her ailing little car up the steep driveway so much as encourage it up; the mossy asphalt was riddled with potholes and threatened to throw the wheels out of alignment and shake her teeth right out of her head. But when she finally reached the summit, there was Bran’s plucky little cottage, … Continue reading Morning Miniature 3.28.19
Morning Miniature 3.26.19
This little watering hole a few miles outside of town wasn’t much of anything, but Roy liked that it looked just sinister enough to discourage anybody besides the locals from pulling off the highway: it was their own version of a gentleman’s club. For Roy, it was also his winding down place, where he routinely … Continue reading Morning Miniature 3.26.19
Piano Story: Taking Care of (Unfinished) Business
When I disemboweled Knoxville Ballet School, liquidated it in the summer of 2012 just before my divorce was final, I was flush with pianos. Shortly before his death, my Uncle Stan had implored me to take the piano from my grandparents’ house in Chattanooga, the one he’d grown up playing before he launched himself into … Continue reading Piano Story: Taking Care of (Unfinished) Business
Morning Miniature 3.23.19
Hank hesitated a moment to wait for the automatic doors to slide open, and then stepped into the little reception area; the woman behind the desk smiled and nodded hello. The air in this place was always a tad too warm and carried the disagreeable tang of fatty cafeteria fare with unmistakable overtones of urine. … Continue reading Morning Miniature 3.23.19
Morning Miniature 3.21.19
She relished the moments when the two of them laughed so hard they couldn’t speak, nay, couldn’t breathe. (This could go on for what seemed an eternity.) So deep a bond existed between them, that a mere wisp of a notion scarcely articulated got them going. Call it a tacit understanding of an idea’s hilarity—for … Continue reading Morning Miniature 3.21.19
Morning Miniature 3.19.19
Those erect ears were the thing, well, maybe it was the quizzical tilt of that massive head attached to them, but no, they were inseparable: the ears that were now taking in and calculating this sensorial ambush, together with the eyes and the nose—that long, long nose which, just before its terminus, sloped downward ever … Continue reading Morning Miniature 3.19.19
Springtime Story: The First Snowdrops
The snowdrop, or Galanthus (from the Greek gála for ‘milk,’ and ánthos for ‘flower’) has supplanted the crocus, and the jonquil, as the reassuring first sign of spring in this Yankee life, still a source of bewilderment for a Southern girl after seven winters in Vermont (seven!). The jonquils have been blooming for a long … Continue reading Springtime Story: The First Snowdrops
Morning Miniature 3.16.19
When you return to the city after some time away from it, you notice its clamor, the noise that is part and parcel of urban life, that people immersed in it no longer hear. Sirens, heavy trucks, trains rumbling under open grates in the sidewalk—and throngs of cabbies slapping their wheels impatiently, unrelentingly, in anger … Continue reading Morning Miniature 3.16.19
