Category: Nonfiction
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Focus, Grit, and Painter’s Tape
The two yellow papers my sixth-grade science and math teachers had given me earlier that day for failing to do my homework were crumpled inside my backpack. I needed Mom to sign them, but it could wait. It was fall, and although I was already getting behind in my classes, the acorns and leaves were…
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Election Day 1960
The year I was eleven, John F. Kennedy ran for president. My father was a Nixon man, my mother undecided. Even those who preferred Dick Nixon were intrigued by the young Kennedy and one of my aunts went to see him at a New Haven campaign event. She said he looked younger in person than…
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The Unbearable Beauty of Now
The second positive pregnancy test—the one where you know it wasn’t a fluke, that it really stuck this time—came a few days after the first one, on my 35th birthday. “How many babies are we talking?” We wouldn’t know for a few weeks yet. Not until we were knee-deep into that bloody obstacle course of the…
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The Body Snatching Spell of Bipolarism
There’s a scene near the end of the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers—the one with Donald Sutherland—that I’ve always found disturbingly familiar. One of the last human survivors, Nancy, approaches Sutherland’s character seeking safety and escape after being separated while running for their lives from the body snatchers. Nancy doesn’t know that he…
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Otto’s Links
“It’s a bit early.” I smelled whiskey as I walk into Ira Jackson’s apartment on St. Mark’s Place, in New York City’s East Village, for my 11am saxophone lesson. Ira came to NY after graduating Cass Tech High School in Detroit and made a living playing saxophone for decades. Ira is about 5’ 6”, mustache, goatee,…