On Saturday nights, our family was happy. During the week, Dad wasn’t ever around, my brother and I fought, and Mom made a sound effort (though not sound enough for her overly observant and analytical daughter) to hide her unhappiness. But on Saturdays, we pretended to be a happy family. And we pretended well.
Alternate title: Why Jude the Obscure Infuriates Me 1982. Eighth grade. Fifth period. Speech class…Mark. I only had three crushes in eighth grade: Scott, Jerry, and Tom Selleck. Mark wasn’t a crush. It was love. And he wasn’t getting the hint. I upheld my end of the eighth-grade romance bargain. I’d done everything I was supposed to do. I’d told my friends, my friends told his friends,
To be honest, I didn’t remember my first kiss. Luckily, I kept diaries growing up (you remember, hard cover books with tiny, tiny, little keys?) Looking through them for this post brought up several issues: • My handwriting was awful; each letter is huge and bloated. The world wide deforestation is due in part to my writing. I wasted huge volumes of paper. I won’t even mention the period where…
Ah, young love. Come on, you remember … those single and early double digit years, before we got older and life started showing up in mortgage payments, grocery lists, and — God help us — $4.65 Frappucinos. Those were the innocent years, filled with wishes and endless possibilties (“When I grow up, I want to be a famous writer!”) and, first kisses. My first kiss – not the kind delivered…
Fifth grade. Danny. He had freckles and smelled like some exotic spice: cardamom or coriander. He was a foster kid and only lived on our street for a year before being sent to another home. What drew me to Danny (other than the mysterious scent) was that he came from a family more screwed up than my own. His brother was in juvenile detention. His mom was in rehab. His…
Spiders send me into paroxysms of joy. Or my first car, a 1980 Fiat Pininfarina Spider 2000 did anyway. I have no idea how I came to own the car. One day it appeared in the driveway and my mother told me that on the 5th of each month I’d need to pay some guy named Courtney $200.00.
