About the author
A Record of Wearing and Worn
Side A - Wearing 1 A tiny, uneven house once sheltered a denim jacket. A girl discovered it wadded up in a garbage bag filled with other hand-me-downs. She rolled back the cuffs and ripped off the patches and wore it, wore it until the long seam across the back only held at the corners, leaving a valley of open space, a frayed tear in the sky. Her father found it shabby. She looked like a hobo. She had a job, wh...
February Done Right
I will go to great lengths to ward off the February blahs. In years past, I have decorated my home with tropical flourishes, distracted myself with games and group trips, tried to embrace winter with snowmobiling and “Doctor Zhivago” weekends. I have done all I can think to do, and February still comes... and stays. My pain is prolonged this year, as it is a Leap Election Year. This is when we make up for time...
Transformation on Toast
If I could put you inside a time machine and send you to 9 a.m., Christmas, in my girlhood home, most of what you’d find would be unsurprising. My brother and sister and I would be lying on the living room floor, surrounded by wrapping paper and candy foil. Somewhere in another part of the house, you would hear pans rattle. You would take a breath and smell bacon frying and realize that my parents were making break...
For Victoria Crawford
I am, at weak times, a creature seeking comfort, trolling the internet at all hours of the night, grasping facts and calling them truth, searching for someone who will tell it straight, hold me responsible, distribute blame. This November marks the ten-year anniversary of one such night for me, one of the nights of searching, submersing myself in every link, crying at the information, overwhelmed by what it contained...
How and Why We Stay Lions Fans
A passerby at a soccer tournament stopped, turned around, and came toward me. "Well," he said, "Did you drink the Kool-Aid?" I imagine this sounds cryptic, but it wasn’t. Here are two clarifying details: 1) It was August in Michigan. 2) I was wearing a Detroit Lions jersey. *** We spend our autumn Sundays, each Thanksgiving, and the rare Monday, in the throws. We visit Ford Field; we stare at our ...
After the Fourth
The days surrounding July 4th normally trumpet the ease of summer, but this year’s music is different. It was Tuesday, the fifth of July, when the horns gave way to the unrelenting beat of the future. A careful listener would have heard the cues sooner. On Friday, my oldest went away with a buddy and his family. We packed my boy’s things and wrote down all the phone numbers. His dad and I spoke out of both sid...
RoboRoach Academy
I may have just met the kid who grows up and cures Alzheimer’s-- the person who will one day claim that he or she started their journey in biomedicine thanks to two guys on a mission to democratize neuroscience. Also, I saw a remote-controlled cockroach. A live cockroach saddled with a circuit backpack, steered via wireless controller. When I heard of it, I was standing in a park watching my son play soccer. A f...
