It’s 1972 and I’m sitting in my wheelchair at the base of the Monkey Temple in Nepal. My brother insists that he try to pull me up the 1,000 stairs. As he tips my chair back, strangers rush around me grabbing every inch of my chair to help…
I’m ditching class to join the throng of Bostonians collectively fleeing their wintry cocoons to embrace the first signs of spring. As I pass tired joggers resting on park benches and young couples sunbathing on brown and green patches of lawn, I notice a man wearing a gray fisherman’s hat sitting in a motorized wheelchair. He’s parked on the edge of the Boston Common--a frozen spectacle among a frenzy of moving bodies…
It is summer in South Texas. Something has happened on the road ahead. The four lane highway has been compressed into two. My old car’s air conditioning is struggling in the triple digit heat. I know I need to give it a small rest or it won’t survive the rest of the season. I decide to turn it off while I’m stuck here…
It’s December in New England, so cold your extremities are numb instantly. I’m sitting in a parked car at the site of a recent five-alarm fire. Six firefighters are missing, dead. The leader turns to me, “These firefighters are tired and devastated. Our only job is to offer a hot cup of coffee and a listening ear if they need it” he says wearily. I wonder how many hours he’s been here, what he has seen…
My running shoes sink slightly into the sand with each step. My steps fall into a rhythm that matches the song playing through my headphones. The sun slowly slips beneath the horizon to my left, scattering pink and orange and purple across the sky. Small waves lap the shore. I run up the coast, alongside the giant crumbling bluffs every day.
There is no one else on the beach, except for…
On a snowy Sunday night at the mall, Alex and I are doing our usual eight laps up and down the corridors, stopping occasionally to allow him to zip up all the misbehaved coats on the racks at Macy's and Dick’s Sporting Goods, the two anchor stores at opposite ends. We are in Macy's and stop to straighten out a rack of blue and white flowered pants which have become askew on their hangers. Two women are standing at the racks when we approach. Both declare the pants "screamy," regardless if you're considering the X-Large or the X-Small. Loud is loud…
The train pulls into the station and people surge towards it. As soon as I get on my heart sinks. Every seat is taken. I push through the door at the end of the carriage; it's a dead end. But it’s also a breathing space, which is more than anyone has in the over-crowded carriage I just left. It’s cold here, peaceful. I sit on my bag and stare out the window as London slips away. This will be a very long three hours.
I’ve been sitting on my own for about five minutes when a girl with dreadlocks pushes her way through the door…
It’s not like how they portray it on TV. We must all be thinking that, sitting for hours in this quietly packed waiting room in this white building off the highway that seemed too inconspicuous to be a clinic. But here we are.
We’re an assortment of ages, races, ethnicities. Some of us are here with partners, while others are here with their mothers. Few of us are here alone. None of us are speaking…
The water is dark and frigid when my campmate and I hold hands and jump. The first ones in, we’re both gasping and sputtering when we resurface, gooseflesh blooming over every inch of skin exposed to the morning air. The other campers laugh at us and the noises we make as we splash, furiously trying to warm up. I don’t think I like polar bear swims.
The sun rises and splinters against the water as we shout, breaking the early stillness. The water’s just beginning to feel manageable by the time we hoist ourselves out of the lake…
It’s normal to go shopping for faith in Kentucky. You pass through churches like they’re window displays or one-night stands and if you’re lucky, you find Jesus. I had burned through a couple in college (a megachurch, a cult of poverty, one with a hip, gay minister), but none of them fit. Even in a room full of misfits, it’s hard not to eye the kid with a verse from the Quran tied around his neck.
One Sunday after a pretty hard breakup, I’m making my way through tiny backstreets…
Exhausted on my way home from work, I stop for groceries. Normally, I enjoy shopping at this small organic market. Bright peppers, freshly-misted greens, and earthy rainbows of yams bring me closer to nature in my gray suburb. Today, I’m distant from my senses.
After weeks of speculation and debate, the news is beginning to urge people to prepare for a pandemic. I look at my grocery list. Blueberries, almond butter, and frozen pizza won’t suffice.
I stand and stare at a shelf of grapes. I tell myself to keep moving, make a plan, don’t interact. Everything appears so normal, but to me, the unknown is overwhelming…
It’s December 3rd, and I walk into Target. I need toilet paper and to look at Christmas lights for a few minutes and try to get in the spirit. To try to stop worrying. To try to be less lonely. To try to stop missing my childhood, my grandparents, the way things used to be. To desperately try and feel the magic and wonder I used to feel during this time of year.
Enter Jerry…
It’s the summer of ‘99, and I have recently run the Big Three gamut of adulthood: a boy broke my heart, I moved out of my childhood home, and after two years of wasting time at a very pricey university, I changed my mind. I am now about a month into a summer job as a camp counselor four states away from home. I decided that I would hate this job about 12 hours after I started, but now I’m bound to an employment contract I’d never bothered to read closely…
It’s a week before Christmas and I’m working outdates in the candy aisle at Walgreens. I’m seven and a half hours into an eight-hour shift. My feet hurt and a recent interaction with a disgruntled customer has put me in a mood. I glance at the clock and urge the minute hand to move faster, but it creeps along like it’s stuck in traffic. I’m sorting through the chocolate bars when someone walks up beside me…
Pulling into Norton’s Audobon Hospital to decide whether palliative care or stoke rehab is the best option for my dad, I notice there is a new parking garage on top of where the old lot used to sit, and I think back to five years ago when my recurrent trips to this parking lot began.
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I stumble out of the hospital in the morning, after my seventh night sleeping in a hospital bed next to Dad…
I've dropped out of college, and spent the last $200 on a one way train ticket to N.C., living with my until-now estranged dad in a small, foreign, southern town and no friends. One week onto a construction job, I hear the guys talking about how one of the carpenters won't be coming in.
"He got arrested," somebody says. "He stabbed his brother…
I met Roosevelt in the housewares section of Goodwill, grieving over a small box.
“Why would someone get rid of this?” he asked as I passed by. The box held a pewter-colored cross with “On Your Graduation” engraved at the top. “Now, you know someone meant to give that to a graduate and for them to keep it, but here it is in the Goodwill. I imagine there’s a story behind that…”
Specialists have told me my youngest son will never speak. He is different in that way, and others, from his older brothers. His differences cement my certainty that like Peter Parker’s alter ego, my youngest possesses a marvelous secret superpower.
Like those sundry specialists, people in public spaces have brief encounters with his world of physical contortions and the sensory filters he uses by twisting himself to engage with sight, sound and taste.
One Saturday, he and I traveled to a big box store to pick up prescriptions…
As a teenager, I was hopeless, forlorn, and despondent beyond repair.
I was a tiny bit social my freshman year of high school, but mostly just retreated into books and bologna sandwiches in the school library as hives of classmates buzzed in hives in the cafeteria.
Soon after I got my driver’s license, I headed out to a theater in the Chicago suburbs. Before the show, I paced outside the theater entrance, puffing cigarettes while reading a creased paperback of Kurt Vonnegut’s early science fiction. I must have looked miserable as hell…
These are some good photos, says the female UPS Store clerk as she inspects her printing work.
Welp, they are photos from a relationship that just ended, I mumble through my mask. I’m hoping that these hand-picked photos will refresh her memory as to how awesome we were.
I’m sorry to hear that. You all look so happy.
That’s what I thought, and the tears start welling up…