I Can See Clearly Now
Although Buffalo Park was a slip and slide mud festival after last week’s snowfall, I walked a mid-day lap on Sunday. People who had driven up the hill to see the snow clustered around the entry to the park, squealing as they made snowballs and snapped photos. I sloshed alone through the melting snow patches on the Nate Avery trail. About a half hour in, I heard the steady cadence of a runner behind me. He trotted by, buffed and sturdy and splattered with mud. He looked like the human equivalent of a rugged offroad sports utility vehicle in a...
read moreSing With Me
The year after I graduated from high school, I crisscrossed the U.S. in a flotilla of Greyhound buses with about 150 people my age. We were one of three traveling casts of Up With People, a wholesome performance troupe singing across small town America and spreading a message of global goodwill. I wasn’t selected because of my superior pipes or formal training; I was chosen because I could hold a tune and I played well with others. I had sung in my grade school chorus, sung in Sunday church, sung to vinyl my friends and I would spin at...
read moreMy Lipstick, Myself
It is the 1960s, and I am five. I’m with my mother in our suburban bathroom, watching her apply makeup. I am mesmerized. And I am imprinted. She holds her Maybelline oval cake of eyeliner under the faucet and coaxes a few drops of water, swirls it with a tiny brush, and swooshes it atop her lash line. She dabs at her nose with a powder puff. She darkens her brows with a pencil. And then the ritual de la resistance—the lipstick–always the final, dramatic act. She swivels the lipstick up from its tube, leans into the mirror. She...
read moreBored Certified
This summer I joined a large group of broken people. After a torqued misstep and a hard fall onto a broken sidewalk, I ripped my meniscus and watched my knee swell into what looked like a head of angry cauliflower. Inside, it felt like a batter of hot lava spiked with razor blades. As I awaited orthoscopic surgery in July, I hobbled around the house, ice packed the joint into submission, and felt sorry for myself. I believed I had some valid reasons for my self-pity, but because I had a three-month summer vacation, a backyard full of pine...
read moreOh Say, Can You See?
I used to write occasionally for the Miami Herald, my local daily newspaper. One day some years back I visited the newsroom to make changes to a story I’d submitted. I sat amidst the din, my head bent over a computer keyboard in pronounced concentration. “May I have your attention?” I looked up to see a knot of people. One woman carried a little cake covered with chocolate frosting and crowned with a lit sparkler and a plastic American flag. About three dozen people formed a semi-circle around the desk that held the cake. In...
read moreThe Tragic Balkan Poet
About 20 years ago, I was awarded a Fulbright grant to teach journalism in Tirana, Albania, the capital city of what was then Europe’s poorest country. At that time, Albania lurched and sputtered in its rebranding from a mysterious Communist outpost to a capitalism-fueled democracy. When I arrived there, the country had no ATMs, no constitution and no steady stream of electricity. Classes at the university were held in a three-story Italianate building, painted in a fading rose and mustard color. Two columns flanked a central staircase...
read moreMuch Ado About Nothing
About a decade ago I was invited by Dan, a jazz pianist, to be a participant at an artist’s retreat. I met Dan at a Nevada Arts Council meeting held in the conference room of a swanky Vegas mega-hotel. We were panelists awarding grants to arts organizations around the state. I could hear the faint musical encouragement of casino slot machines as we sat behind name cards discussing the dozens of applications stuffed into lethally sized binders. Cigarette smoke drifted into the room whenever the door opened. Dan told me about the retreat over...
read moreMy Old Friend Grief
My father’s death in my mid-20s introduced me to grief. The sorrow I felt had a language and texture all its own. So I did what my journalism training taught me to do: drink more and dive into research. I learned about the stages of grieving, the physical symptoms, the scientific blah blah blah of it. Armed with all that information, I felt soothed and masterful, and after a respectable number of months, I thought I’d Marie Kondo-ed my way out of it. The knee-buckling weeping, the dream state numbness, the radioactive sorrow were jettisoned...
read moreFrom Here to There
It was late morning as I sat in an emptyish Munich airport cafe, bleary from a transatlantic flight. Six hours loomed before my connection to Sofia. I decided to spend the time drinking coffee and feeling sorry for myself. A smartly dressed older man and woman came to the table beside mine and laid down their carry-on bags, coats, water bottles and backpacks. After a brief discussion in what sounded like Danish, the man and the woman began reassembling their belongings. I glanced, but was lasered into Wordle, determined to keep my winning...
read moreMy Friend Elmo
It was in the late 1980s when I was indentured at the University of Florida and saw an ad in our campus newspaper looking for marketing managers for some unspecified “family focused” entertainment business. The ad promised the trifecta: travel, independence and big bucks. Even though I was in my senior year, close to the college finish line and anticipated an internship and subsequent job as a newspaper reporter, I had a dodgy relationship with patience and a dramatic familiarity with instant gratification. I was also on the exit ramp of a...
read moreOptimism is my superpower
Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit. Helen Keller Mad respect to Helen Keller and her starchy endorsement of optimism, but I don’t subscribe to the notion that pessimists have never swashbuckled or furthered the species. I don’t have any hard science on this, but pessimists are everywhere. And we can’t just write them off. They teach university courses. They cut our hair. They friend us on Facebook....
read moreGame Theory; I Give You My Wordle
Each morning I ARISE, brush my TEETH, heat some WATER, make some TOAST and THINK about my day. But first I open Wordle, the tasty online word game less than a year old and more addictive than potato chips. In an interview with the BBC earlier this year, game inventor Josh Wardle said his aim was to make Wordle something akin to “a delightful snack.” And so I bite. But briefly. Unlike chips or the mindless overindulgence snack food can induce, Wordle rations itself: One word a day, five letters, five chances. I traffic in language, make my...
read moreAnd there it was; The return of collective effervescence in my classroom
It was about a week ago, a late Thursday afternoon. Outside the classroom windows, golden hour saturated the light with amber. My advanced writing class had just concluded. Seven students Zooming in through laptops vanished from the checkerboard of faces on the projector screen in front of the room. At my university, we are hybrid teaching, a serve-all-customers approach that shortchanges everyone involved. For my advanced writing course about one-third of the students join the class on Zoom; the other two-thirds are there in person. The 15...
read moreFirst love: Where are you Lawrence Perez?
On a muggy August day before my fifth grade school year was to begin, Mom circled my three brothers, my sister and me. She told us that we were moving to Indiantown, a scratchy, green patch of inland South Florida that we’d visited a few times. Indiantown was all I knew of “the country.” Mom said we’d be moving in a week and living in Indiantown in a trailer on my grandfather’s cattle ranch. It’s just for one school year, she said. She told us that we would move back to our same house on our same street with our same friends in one year. It...
read moreThe Bins; Goodwill Hunting
Fred went to prowl for vinyl. Audria was a frequent flyer who lasered in on collectible china. Aude and her husband had the eye for mid-century modern in the midst of cheap motel room castoffs. I was fixated on classroom globes from the USSR era. We weren’t a group, but almost every weekend we were regulars at The Bins, the unofficial name of a long gone Goodwill store on Steves Boulevard. The Bins has since migrated to Route 66, and that place has no story for me. But when I moved to Flag in 2005, I made my way to The Bins on Steves to do...
read moreGray matters: It’s the color of the year
Longtime L’Oréal face Andie MacDowell showed up on my Facebook feed last week throwing shade on the anti-aging industrial complex. In an interview with The Zoe Report, MacDowell relayed that she was embracing her 63-year-old self by nixing hair coloring and showing her gray. After being cajoled by her children and living through the pandemic curtailment of personal services like haircuts and coloring, MacDowell decided to let her gray flag fly. “I think women are tired of the idea that you can’t get old and be beautiful,” she said....
read moreFeeding the fire
Photo by Jake Bacon I was a kid at the circus the first time I saw someone eat fire. The circus tent was darkened and a man stood on stage in a circle of light. He wore a sparkly jacket, removed his hat, bent his head back dramatically and used what looked like barbecue skewers to insert balls of fire into his mouth. He closed his lips around each fireball and poof! The fire was gone. It was creepy and thrilling. I also didn’t get it even though I joined in the applause. People eating fire? Why? Doesn’t fire burn you? Aren’t we supposed to be...
read moreDancing with Sir Isaac Newton
A half dozen of us gathered recently for Easter dinner, a collection of single friends. Jazz, rack of lamb, Alsatian wine, animated conversations about politics. It felt like the Before Times. As we tucked into our dessert, the neighbors dropped in—a youngish couple with their 10-year-old son, Andre. About half of the group drifted to the balcony. Andre and I stayed inside, and one of the hosts told him about Zydeco music. Spotify obliged, an effervescence colonized the room, and Andre started dancing on the living room carpet. His open face...
read moreBoarding Pass
When I was growing up, girls didn’t skateboard. Girls did the dishes. I wasn’t forbidden to skateboard, but it was a boy thing, a thing my brothers did. Back then, breaking into boy territory meant wearing pants to school. We had a long, sloping driveway beside our suburban house in central Florida. After school my brothers busted out the boards and practiced their moves. I watched from the kitchen window—their long, adolescent boy bodies like human linguini as they swirled and stretched into handstands and jumps. I don’t remember envy or...
read moreSofia Audio Dispatch
“I usually associate accordion music with Paris,” the audio story begins, “but I’m not in Paris. I’m in Sofia, Bulgaria… I teach here in Bulgaria, and usually I return to the States for the year-end holidays. But not this year.” Listen to the full audio story here.
read moreThe Swimming Nuns
When I was about 8 years old, the scariest person I knew was a nun who taught fourth grade at my school: Sister Margaret Joseph. In my dreams Sister Margaret Joseph, or Maggie Joe as we called her, had a recurring, starring role. She mutated into a large bird with barbed wire talons and death-ray eyeballs that swooped down and pulled my hair for crimes like stumbling over a new word as I read aloud in class or asking how the clouds were able to support the cumbersome, ornate throne God reportedly sat on in the heavens above. At St. Francis of...
read moreThe Things We Carry: Weights and Measures of Living
When I first moved to Flagstaff about 15 years ago, I taught 12th grade English at Northland Prep Academy. The class centered on close reading of a handful of texts. One of my choices was Tim O’Brien’s raw carnival of a book, “The Things They Carried,” a cluster of interlocking stories informed by O’Brien’s service in the Vietnam War. I have a freeze frame memory of the day a student’s face illuminated with an epiphany. Maybe, he said, this book isn’t just about the things that we know the soldiers are carrying—love letters, bug spray,...
read moreMallard Island/5
This week, something a little different. Laura Kelly recorded this piece for Flagstaff Letter from Home.
read moreWait for it; Finding the spacious inside the restless
Queueing at the post office yesterday to send a package. Social distancing, masking. I joined the chorus of obliging customers, willing to take our turns. I felt patient and cooperative in my waiting. Video conferencing a week ago with my sibs to discuss our ailing mother. Four there, one late. We small talked and we waited. And then we waited some more. I felt prickly and irritated in my waiting. Digesting the recent dismal numbers showing spikes in COVID-19 infections after all 50 states eased quarantine restrictions. I feel resigned and...
read moreThe crying game; Flying into a vulnerable reality
“Laughing and crying, you know it’s the same release.” —Joni Mitchell I made my way back to the United States last Saturday after the completion of a disorienting spring semester at my university in Bulgaria. The notion of flying internationally unleashed trepidation, but my primal need to be near my ailing mother in Florida was the stronger force. As I walked off the jetway into London’s Heathrow Airport Terminal 2, the vast, empty corridors made my gauges spin. No throngs. No announcements. Nothing. The scene felt confusing and profoundly...
read moreTiny faces; I teach. I learn. I isolate. I yearn.
My brother called last night just as I’d climbed under my covers. We traded stories about emotional numbness and our lapsed personal hygiene. I’ve spent the whole day wearing nothing but my underpants, he said. I countered with the admission that I hadn’t showered in five days. He told me that my nephew—his 25-year-old son living and working in New York City—has a new girlfriend. They’d all shared a Zoom dinner last night. My nephew and his new sweetie cooked pasta in Brooklyn; my brother and sis-in-law cooked pasta in Miami. How is she? I...
read moreEating cake in the bed; On the pleasures of being an aunt
When my niece Carmen and her brother Lucas were children, I often babysat and stayed with them while their parents went on business trips. I am very close to my brother and sister-in-law. We lived in the same neighborhood, and I saw those kids almost every day. At times I felt like a third parent. But I am not a parent; I am something far more delicious. I am an aunt. One evening while I was in charge, they were cranky, I was cranky, and it was dinnertime. Carmen must have been 8, and Lucas was 5. The cupboard held no palatable options, and...
read moreA bird in the hand; And fewer in the skies
It was during my early adolescence when I saw Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds. Critics were mixed in their reception. I wasn’t. It terrified me. Before I watched the film, I’d thought of birds as benign and decorative. I saw them as accessories for trees and the sky. They looked good sitting on docks and they made nice sounds. And they fly, which is one of the coolest things ever. As a kid, my siblings and I spent hours chasing sandpipers that skittered at the edge of ocean waves during beach visits. I watched pelicans dive bomb for...
read moreLetter to myself; Dear me
Last Thursday was the final meeting of my fall semester Writing for Media class. Final exams loomed. Exhaustion etched shadows beneath everyone’s eyes. There were 21 students in the room, the survivors of three and a half months of composing and editing, learning the rigors of media writing in a language that is not their mother tongue. Bulgarians, Austrians, Kazakhs, Macedonians, Spaniards, Norwegians, Ukrainians, Albanians, Belarusians. The students spent the semester forging new neural pathways and sweating their way to new muscle memory....
read moreSinging open my grief; Into the jumble of radioactive emotions
I was 27 when my father died. I went numb and took a job in Japan as a group leader for 10 American high school exchange students. The job required that I also live with a family. When our bus pulled into the supermarket parking lot where we were to meet our host parents, all I knew about Yuko was that she was in her 40s, she taught English, and she was recently widowed. A slight woman with chin-length hair held a sign bearing my name. “My American daughter,” she said, as I extended my hand. “My Japanese mother,” I replied. We said nothing as...
read moreThere is a season; Fall as a muse and metaphor
“Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one’s exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance.” ― Yoko Ono I grew up in south Florida and lived with two seasons: summer, which lasted about nine months, and summer without cloying humidity, which coincided with what most of the rest of the country calls winter. I was a girl with ample sunshine, but I was a girl without seasons. During my childhood, snow was...
read moreA bump in the road; A chance encounter at the beginning of forever
It was Christmas Day, clear and sunny in south Florida, the sort of weather that makes even the most curmudgeonly among us entertain the notion that the world just might be rippling with unseen magic and possibili This was around 20 years ago. I lived in Miami then; my beau lived in north Florida. Christmas Day is his birthday, and in late morning, I set out for the five-hour drive to share a holiday meal and a birthday cake with my sweetie. Traffic was sparse on the interstate. About 90 minutes into my drive I whizzed by a car on the...
read morePull the trigger; Disturbing the comfortable and comforting the disturbed
WARNING: CONTENT MAY BE OFFENSIVE OR DISTURBING TO SOME AUDIENCES. Trigger warnings—alerts that material may trigger someone to re-experience trauma—have been deployed more frequently in the past few years atop news stories, in university course syllabi, on signage accompanying art exhibitions. Offensive. Disturbing. Who decides for whom? The headlines and story summaries offered here were culled from news articles last week in the Washington Post, The New York Times and the Arizona Daily Sun. None had a trigger warning. All offended. All...
read moreOh, the places you’ll go; Lifelong lessons for graduates new and old
Dear graduates, You have recently crossed a metaphoric threshold signified by diplomas decorated with inscrutable signatures. You wore a black mortar board and a muumuu. You radiated relief and accomplishment. Optimally, you are poised for change, ready to be launched and eager to embrace the next phase of your life. Realistically, you are stressed, distracted and trying to cram your worldly possessions into a U-Haul trailer. Congratulations! I’m not in the forecast business, but I am in the living-out-loud business. I am also in the business...
read moreThe marginalized experience; Keeping books alive
One of my favorite students, set to graduate summa cum laude this month, came to my office last week with a handful of books. She told me she had bought some for her literature classes and others to feed what I have come to know as her effervescent intellect. She said she was divesting of most of her possessions to prepare for a year of backpacking around Asia before strapping into graduate school and asked if I wanted a few of the books to add to my library. “But,” she said apologetically, “they aren’t perfect.” Her voice dropped into the...
read moreWe must want to listen; An homage to W.S. Merwin
The poet W.S. Merwin died last month on the Ides of March. According to the Roman calendar, the Ides fall on the 15th. When Rome dominated Western civilization, the Ides of March was believed to have been a day to settle debts. Who knows what debt Merwin owed on this celestial plane. What many of us know is what he gave. His publishing house issued a statement saying he had died in his sleep on his 16-acre conservancy in Hawaii where he curated and nurtured a collection of rare palm trees. The headline of his obituary in The New York...
read moreThe last word; Obituaries and necrologs
As I approached my apartment building in Sofia, Bulgaria, a few days ago, I saw a necrolog, the Bulgarian version of an obituary, pasted onto a window beside the front door. In the States we read obituaries in newspapers or on websites, but the Bulgarian way to announce a death is to make simple, letter-sized notices and distribute them into public life. Instead of circumspect paragraphs, necrologs use visuals: a small head shot, a birthdate, a death date, a generosity of white space and little more. They are affixed onto doors, clustered on...
read moreThe Love Ambassador; Some of the life of Pi
It was Christmas Day 2007. My sister Julia, my friend Audria and I motored on I-40 from Albuquerque to Flagstaff through a light snow that blew sideways like confetti shot from a winter cannon. We had spent a few days in Santa Fe, reveling in the New Mexico slant on La Navidad—ambling down Canyon Road singing Christmas carols on streets lined by luminaria, warming ourselves beside bonfires and drinking mulled wine for sale from grownup versions of lemonade stands. On that overcast Christmas morning the three of us turned westward and began...
read moreFood groups; The past, the present and all the meals in between
Last Tuesday, 23 of us sat around a sturdy conference table in the middle of our university classroom. It was my biweekly Advanced Writing for Media class, and the upcoming assignment: food memoir. Each student was to write a 1,000-word personal story about eating or cooking or something about food. Glorious food. Before the story writing was the storytelling. Luka said his grandfather looked like Stalin and owned a nameless tavern back in his home country of Georgia. It was there where Luka watched the generations of his family gather, share...
read moreThe pen, the sword; Digging deep for radical optimism
The news broke earlier this month on a Sunday. Viktoria Marinova, an investigative journalist, had been killed in Ruse, Bulgaria, a city in the northeast corner of this country. The Danube, on its epic flow, runs through Ruse. Bulgaria is on the river’s southern bank; Romania is to the north. Marinova’s death had been brutal, and the hypotheses swirled. She was 30 years old. Two days later I walked into a classroom at the American University in Bulgaria (AUBG) where I teach journalism. Around the conference table—23 students. AUBG is an...
read moreOut of the ashes; I can smell America burning
In August I sold my car Thor to a friend’s daughter who lives in Salem, Oregon. I offered to drive Thor to her doorstep, envisioning a nostalgic road trip punctuated with serendipity and fertile solitude. I had begun my cross-country drive-a-thon earlier in the summer when I flew into Miami Beach, where I had deposited Thor before returning to the university in Bulgaria where I teach. Being away from the States and viewing it from afar incubates an insistent hunger inside me to find evidence of American kindness and pluck, of goodwill and...
read moreOur condiments, ourselves; What our fridge doors tell us
In our fridge, the shelves lining the door are colonized by condiments. Shelf after shelf of condiments. The condiments jostle for limited real estate, obscure their labels behind the plastic railings that corral them into place and rattle a glass-on-glass chorus when the door is opened. Sound familiar? The rest of the fridge holds food from 2018. But the condiment shelves are the historical section, a kind of chilled museum featuring artifacts, fossils and oddities—jars of puckered capers, gifty homemade jams bearing faded Christmas...
read moreDon’t bug me; Invasion of the body snackers
Dear Flagstaff, I am sorry. Truly, madly, deeply sorry. If you’ve noticed an increase in mosquitoes this summer, I have to take the blame. If you’ve been ambushed by a swarm, if you’ve slapped more than the usual seasonal dose, if you’ve returned home from a walk in the forest with what looks like a constellation chart of bug bites on your arms and legs, mea culpa. Let me explain. If you grow up in South Florida, as I did, you grow up with mosquitoes. Not the occasional mosquito or the tepid gathering of a half dozen that gingerly land on...
read moreField notes from the East Coast; I, too, sing America
It was late afternoon earlier this week, day eight of my road trip from the tip of Florida up the East Coast to Vermont. It was time for coffee to fuel the next 200 miles I needed to bank to reach my final destination. I pulled off Interstate 88 in verdant, undulating eastern New York. Two women sitting on a stoop directed me to the town’s only coffee shop. Inside were three tables, a duet of overstuffed couches, a chalkboard listing fancy coffees and a lanky barista. As I made my way to the back counter to order, two women in hiking gear...
read moreInto the water; And out of this world
This summer I went swimming, this summer I might have drowned, But I held my breath and I kicked my feet and I moved my arms around. This summer I swam in the ocean and I swam in a swimming pool Salt my wounds, chlorine my eyes, I’m a self-destructive fool. ~ “The Swimming Song” by Loudon Wainwright III When I was in my early 20s, I was a recent college grad living in Tampa, Florida. I took a summer job as an aquatic director before I joined the lockstep of the Real World. Henry David Thoreau is quoted as warning against any enterprise...
read moreA Song in Our Hearts; To Sing With People
Those who wish to sing always find a song. ~ Swedish proverb When I was in fourth grade, we got a new teacher at our Catholic school: Dr. Leone. She had tight, permed curls and a gruff voice. In the beginning I was a little afraid of her. We all were. She wasn’t mean to us, but her voice made her sound mad all the time, even when she wasn’t. I had never met a woman doctor, and I had never met a doctor who didn’t take care of sick people. Dr. Leone told us she was a doctor because she had gone to school for a very long time. I grew to...
read moreI wear the pants; One leg at a time
After seven years of being conscripted into Catholic school and wearing a uniform every day, I was thrilled when I deserted to public school because I could choose what I wore to school. But no pants. Though it was the 1970s, pants on females were still considered radioactive and radical. Pants were part of the school’s no-fly, dress code zone along with halter tops, miniskirts and see-through blouses. About six months into ninth grade, our avuncular principal, Mr. Kersey, opened the school announcements with some big and welcome...
read moreNo more pencils, no more books; The things we carry
The first time I passed through a metal detector, I was walking into a high school to attend my first day of class in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I was 16 and an exchange student. It was my first solo experience abroad, and Sao Paulo was an eye-opening warren of skyscrapers, frenetic traffic and the kind of big city-ness I had only seen before on television. The school I attended there was nothing like my suburban high school in central Florida. This inner city school towered 12 stories high and looked more like an office building or a corporate...
read moreMermaid; I dream of Weeki Wachee
A month ago, I made a pilgrimage to Weeki Wachee, Florida, a dot of a city on the marshy Gulf side of the state at about the same latitude as Orlando. Weeki Wachee is little more than one square mile, has a population of 12 and is all about cold water. I went there to watch mermaid auditions. Weeki Wachee means little spring in the language of the Seminole Indians, and that spring is where an underground river surfaces, surging daily 117 million gallons of cold, clear, carbonated water. The river flows out to the Gulf of Mexico, and the...
read moreI can pedal from here to there; Where my bike takes me
In early December last year, my friend Dan and I met in Amsterdam for a brief winter vacation. It was sunny, hat-and-gloves weather when we arrived. During the next few days, temperatures dropped and slushy snow fell with what felt like malicious zeal. The Dutch are stalwart bicycle riders, pedaling sturdy, black bikes that are the style equivalent of sensible shoes. On they pedal—hundreds of them—along designated bike lanes regulated by bicycle semaphores across the flat landscape that is their entire country. On they pedal with children...
read moreOmar on the wall; May all your fishes come true
I was living in Miami Beach when I turned 36. For my birthday, my friends pooled their money and gave me a fish. I named the fish Omar. Omar is an arcing, six-foot long Atlantic sailfish, a showy and regal sea creature adorned with a dorsal fin that stands like a starched cape along the length of its body. The bill is an elongated sword spackled with what feels like sandpaper. Iridescent silver flecks the blues and greys that color his body. Though Omar has been ferociously fiberglassed, taxidermied and shellacked, that fish continues to...
read moreInk + Paper; All of my life has been lived there
It was dark outside but warm—always warm and humid—when the truck dropped off the newspapers strung into bundles too heavy for me to lift. They thudded onto our front porch, divided into two or three stacks: the main section and the special sections to be tucked inside before we folded the paper into thirds and cinched each midsection with a rubber band. It was the Palm Beach Post; my uncle Chris wrote stories for the paper, but I didn’t know that then. Ink and paper—every writer’s dance partners. I was seven or eight, and outside of...
read moreLess is more; On the road with Eva
This is not a technophobe’s lament. This is not an anti-smartphone screed. This is an ode to the untethered glories of my July road trip without a screen, a signal or a network. The passenger manifest: me, my 12-year-old niece Eva, my beastly driving machine Thor, and all the gear and brio needed for six nights of camping in southern Utah. Her parents—my brother and sister-in-law—suggested the visit, and I proposed her first trip to the North Rim, Zion and Bryce. I had only a vague idea of who my niece might be as a young woman on her own,...
read moreSand in my shoes; When the student is ready, the teacher will arrive
It wasn’t my mother; my mother doesn’t watch soap operas. Maybe it was the woman who came over to iron and babysit some afternoons or the mother of one of my friends. The soap opera was “Days of Our Lives.” Even though it was about pretty grownups in shiny clothes doing mean things to each other, it wasn’t the show that mesmerized me; it was the opening. A shot of an hourglass fills the screen. It is in a wooden holder that resembles a temple, and it sits on a tabletop. Blue skies and puffy clouds embellish the sky behind the hourglass. As a...
read moreA witness, a passage, a Tuesday morning; From this realm to the next
After I savor my morning cup of coffee, I walk the two-mile loop in Buffalo Park as my way of coming into the day. Morning Edition pipes into my skull, the mountains embolden and soothe with their nearness, and well-being coats my central nervous system. About a month ago, I was midway through my second lap in the park when I saw a man and woman stopped ahead of me on the trail. The woman held a cell phone and craned her neck right and left, as if looking for something. Both appeared confused. A few feet away lay a man on his side, crumpled...
read moreIn the thrall of lightning; A perilous and evanescent beauty
I returned to South Florida last week for a family gathering. Humidity textured the air, temperatures edged into the low 90s, and thunderstorms rumbled each afternoon, shaking mangoes off trees and creating steamy, spectral patches that rose from the baked asphalt. Under an overcast sky and a warm, weak rain, I rode my bicycle home from a friend’s house one night. The streets were glossy and noiseless. I pedaled through warm puddles. Lightning rippled and flashed violet waves of light behind low clouds, creating an illuminated dome above my...
read moreThe roses and the road trip; A fragrance that clings to the hand
Last Thursday as two friends and I loaded the truck for our road trip to a music festival, we paused in front of 60 red roses corralled in a bucket on my friend’s kitchen counter. “What should I do with these?” she asked. Her 60th birthday had been the day before; the long stems were a gift from her husband. The blooms were open, showing off their unblemished red petals. The scarlet flowers were a vision of floral perfection. They would be dead by the time my friend returned home. My two friends and I road trip with gusto. We fashion loose...
read moreDo you hear what I hear? Learning to listen
It was the Thursday before Easter. I faced 23 university students clustered around a conference table. We were just past the halfway mark of our course called Writing for the Ear. Today we are going on a soundwalk, I said. No talking, no texting. Remain silent and amble behind me at a comfortable pace. Try to take in the world through sound. Turn down your overworked visual input channels and suspend your impulse to label the sounds you hear. The aim of the soundwalk is to listen to the overlooked, mundane choir of urban life. For 35 minutes,...
read moreNo hall pass to the high ground; Getting closer to the rush and tug
It was a fall night. A friend was helping to present an acoustic music concert at the Unitarian church in Doney Park. She was stationed in the lobby, selling tickets. I didn’t know anyone else there, so I sat by myself until a man edged into the seat beside mine. A woman was behind him. They held hands. As soon as he settled into his chair, he turned toward me. “Hi. I am Joseph, and I have brain damage.” Exclamation points decorated his sentences. His eyes darted, and his voice lurched as he told me a zigzagged story about the accident that...
read moreWhere there’s smoke; All in a circle—and then all scattered
It was in the evening a few Mondays ago, and the city center was empty as I walked home from the university. I rounded the corner onto a side street. About half-a-dozen kids huddled in front of a shuttered storefront just outside of the cone of light the streetlamp cast. We were the only people around. From their height I pegged them at about 12 years old. When they heard my footsteps clonk onto the sidewalk, they shushed, froze, and turned toward me. They sized me up a little too desperately and then turned back toward each...
read moreWhat water told me; A trilogy of lessons
I caught an episode of The Twilight Zone last night. A grade school-aged sister and brother sit beside a pool with wet hair. Towels drape their bony shoulders. The father looks dressed for work; the mom looks as if she is off to the country club for mahjong and Mai Tais. The parents glare at one another and give the children the news: We don’t like each other, and we’ve grown weary of this charade. We are getting a divorce. You will either live with Mom or Dad. You choose. The kids freak out and begin trying to stitch their lives back...
read moreUnzipped; Thanks, but no thanks
Football game white noise from the wood-paneled den. The curling perfume of dinner rolls in the oven. Dad wears an apron and wields the electric carving knife over a golden hump of overcooked turkey. Again we gather at the big family table for Thanksgiving. We are seven Kellys and a shaggy assortment of strays—South American exchange students, a foster child or two, my brother’s friend Jack who ran away from home, and my mom’s taekwondo instructor, who breaches protocol when he brings kimchi as his addition to the menu. Standard...
read moreMy new friend Feri: A messenger of the gods
That’s Feri in the photo. He lives in Romania. He is the son of a friend of a friend, and I think he is 8. Maybe 9? Whatever the number, he is a lanky boy child, gooey with curiosity and miles away from the swampland of adolescence. I met Feri a few weeks ago. I had gone to Romania to visit my friend, who was launching her first book. When Feri heard me speaking English to his parents, he flashed his high beams and said, “How are you?” Then he counted very deliberately to 13, but left out 11 and 12. When I smiled at him, he skittled around...
read moreThe library: Bridging the outside and inside worlds
A few weeks ago, I continued the nostalgia tour of my South Florida childhood with my cousin Kathleen. Kathleen is a few years older than I and lives near the small, suburban island where we both grew up. After plundering our former neighborhood, Kathleen and I knocked on the door of the lakefront, two-story house where our grandparents used to live. No answer, so we snuck into the backyard and posed for pictures by the swimming pool, re-enacting the mischief we used to share as young girls. We then motored to the mainland to circumnavigate...
read moreBoth sides now; Keeping my head in the clouds
When my nephew Lucas was in fourth grade, he gave me a mobile he’d made for his Earth science class identifying common clouds. Yarn tethered four napkin-sized squares of light blue construction paper to a clothes hanger. On each square, cotton balls had been tortured into puffy or stringy shapes and affixed with generous dollops of glue. His wiggly 9-year-old handwriting identified each cloud type: cumulus, stratus, nimbus and cirrus (which he misspelled as circus, furthering the charm). The mobile thrilled me because I loved Lucas and...
read moreMallard Island; Finding home away from home
Four years ago I spent a long weekend in a Reno conference room as one of five panelists charged with evaluating grant applications for the Nevada Arts Council. Dan was a fellow panelist and jazz pianist. He and I sparked when we heard ourselves voicing similar language to publicly register our thoughts about the applicants. After tedious days of haggling and horsetrading, Dan and I segued into animated philosophical conversations about beauty, truth, art, music. Dan spoke about a six-night retreat he was curating that summer on a remote,...
read moreOverdrive, Motoring fast: The Final Frontier
I motored westward on I-40 toward Death Valley. My car, Thor, was loaded with gear, a funk CD compiled by DJ Don Durango, and directions to a top-secret campsite with views reputed to induce something akin to Nirvana. I was little more than an hour into my getaway when I nosed up behind a swarm of RVs living large in both lanes, chugging away at top speeds of about 45 mph. I moved into the passing lane. Chaka Khan made it all the way through “Tell Me Something Good” before the RV in front of me began to muster the octane it needed to speed up...
read moreLove letter to the Mojave; Freedom and danger in the high desert
I read Abbey’s quote last Wednesday morning. It was typed onto a sheet of white paper and posted on a bulletin board in the Mojave National Preserve. The taste of freedom and the smell of danger sound a little like the mantra of a Cold War spy, but Abbey’s words about wilderness become an anthem in the vast high desert of the Mojave, one of my treasured places for solitude and silence. An hour earlier, I had awakened as first light crept over the Providence Mountains, unzipped out of my sleeping bag and pulled on a hoodie. My Jet Boil...
read moreThe parallel universe; You’ll get the call
Once more my deeper life goes on with more strength, as if the banks through which it moves had widened out. — Ranier Maria Rilke You get the call. You have gotten the call. You will get the call. Mine came from one of my brothers a few weeks ago. Flat voice, naked, no artificial sweetener: “You need to get here, Laura. She is in the intensive care unit, and she is not doing well.” It’s about your mother. It’s about your son, your sweetie. It is someone sewn into your heart, someone whose death would unmoor you, someone whose illness has...
read moreFrom one to the next; It takes a mentor
I had dinner with a friend last week; she is about 20 years younger. We were next door neighbors a while back, and a friendship bloomed between us even though a generation separates us. She is radiant and thoughtful, and our friendship continues the way it began—unedited candor and shared problem solving about whatever our hearts grapple with. As we traded details of our work and love lives, talk turned to mentors, older women in who had bumped into our lives and inspired us. That inspiration became a soft-focus teaching that guided us and...
read moreAll saints, all souls; Finding the line
Sunday morning. All Saints Day. I had spent the night at a friend’s house; a group of us were there tucked into a honeycomb of bedrooms. In the wake of the previous evening’s Halloween shenanigans, we all awoke slowly and shambled toward the kitchen to begin the sacred ritual of coffee making. We clutched our mugs and stood around the kitchen counter. In the unhurried and enfolding presence that Sunday mornings offer, we chose to acknowledge the day by telling stories of our grandmothers. Microbursts of memory, a tumble of adjectives and then...
read moreKevin and Joe; My one wild and precious life
I didn’t recognize the incoming phone number when I took the call last week. It was a friend from college days. He and I have kept in touch over the years, but he lives in Florida, he’s not a big Facebook guy, and it’s been three years or so since we’ve seen one another or conversed.
read moreThe cat’s meow; How we are who we are
When my 21-year-old niece Carmen moved in with me six months ago, we visited the Humane Society one rainy Sunday to select a cat to bring into our petless lives. Before we got there, I decreed that the animal would be named Walter Cronkite, no matter the gender. Carmen was unfazed. She knew of my propensity for naming cats after broadcast journalists. She reminded me that when she was 8, her family had taken on two kittens they found abandoned in their neighborhood. They—brother number one, my sis-in-law, Carmen and 6-year-old...
read moreSleep talking; Courting nature’s sweet nurse
A few weeks ago I was staying the night at a friend’s house. It was well past dinnertime. Clean dishes nestled into the drying rack, and a spirited conversation had ebbed. My friend’s 6-year-old daughter held my hand as she guided me up the stairs to the guest room. I kissed her good night and told her I was going to sleep. “But where do you go?” she asked. I pointed toward the bed. She shook her head. “Where do you go?” she repeated. Her face scrunched into a kiddie mix of confusion and frustration. Again I pointed at the bed. “No,” she...
read moreLittle Debbie’s sweet fix; My adolescent drug of choice
I am 13 or 14. It’s a school night. Mom and I work in the kitchen, rattling plates into the dishwasher. My brothers and sister cluster in our wood-paneled family room watching Adam 12. Dad is away on business. I ask my mother about love: When does it come? How will I know? What was it like to fall in love? Mom answers matter-of-factly. Her tone suggests that the topic is pesky and frivolous. She says a few general things about love and then her announcement: In a few years your father and I will divorce, she says. This blindsides me. On the...
read moreSaying grace; You have to work for it, and then it works for you
I was 7 or 8 when Mom enrolled me and my younger sister in ballet class with Miss Eileen. Even though I am more of a jazz hands and tap dance kind of girl, I was enthralled with the shoes and the costumes, the pale and milky leotards, the discipline. Someone decrepit sat at the piano plinking music. Lines of coltish girls followed Miss Eileen’s croaky directives. I don’t remember much beyond that, except for my effort. It surfaces from my recollection as a form of muscle memory. In that dance class I held my hands just so, turned my...
read moreIndiantown; For the first time
On a July day before my fifth grade school year began, Mom and Dad circled my three brothers, my sister and I. They told us we were moving to Indiantown, a one-stoplight village in rural South Florida. We’d be moving in a week to my grandfather’s cattle ranch, which was more Roseanne than Ralph Lauren. We’d live in a doublewide trailer encircled by some scraggly scrub pine in agricultural flatlands. Indiantown is a former Seminole Indian trading post, a midway point between the Atlantic Ocean and Lake Okeechobee. Indiantown was a 90-minute...
read moreMe and Mama-san; Singing open my grief
When my father died, I was 27. I went numb and took a job in Japan as a group leader for 10 American high school exchange students. The job required that I also live with a family. When our bus pulled into the supermarket parking lot where we were to meet our host parents, all I knew about Yuko was that she was in her 40s, she taught English, and she was recently widowed. A slight woman with chin-length hair held a sign bearing my name. “My American daughter,” she said, as I extended my hand. “My Japanese mother,” I replied. We said nothing...
read moreSchool daze; High school redux
About six of us clustered in the kitchen of a friend’s house recently. We had gathered for a party to share food, wine and stories. One friend congratulated me on my new job, and our group conversation topic veered. Our stories became tales of High School Hell. We took turns one-upping each other with our memories of misery: our geekiness, our awkwardness, our painful lurching toward young adulthood. There were more than 1,500 kids in my central Florida public high school. The teachers were them; we were us. It was called education, but it...
read moreClue me in; The enduring influence of Nancy Drew
A couple of Halloweens ago, the first knock on my front door once darkness descended was from two pre-teens who are daughters of a friend. One was a princess, decked out in a costume of pink meringue and froth. The other wore a strand of pearls, a chaste sweater set and a knee-length skirt. She looked like someone in front of a microphone at a political fundraiser. What are you? I asked. She rolled her eyes and answered with obvious exasperation: I am Nancy Drew. Nancy Drew? The supergirl sleuth who was my super deluxe childhood hero? Girls...
read moreTell me a story; Working with the work
It is two weeks before the end of fall semester. Two weeks until I will return to the United States and close out my year of teaching journalism and storytelling here in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, a Central Asian nation slightly smaller than South Dakota. Soon I will return to my beloved Flagstaff. But today I am here in these tender days of goodbye. I teach three courses at the university; digital storytelling has become my favorite. The idea of the class is to tell first-person stories using layers of words, sound, images. Why? Everyone has...
read moreFire drill; Burning down the house
It wasn’t that long ago, late October, mid-day, mid-week. I was in a classroom on the third floor of our four-story university building, readying the projector for a PowerPoint I was going to present when my storytelling class began in about five minutes. Above the din and swirl of students in the hallway, I heard what sounded like a bell and then an announcement. I took notice because even though I have been teaching in this university for 11 months, I have never heard the PA system being used. The bell sounded as if it were being rung...
read moreBen Bradlee and me; What was that is not any more
I rendezvoused with a graduate school friend a few weekends ago. Verena and I were in a class of about three dozen journalists who marauded Washington, D.C., in 1990. Most of us were print reporters. All of us were swashbucklers, young and hungry, enamored of journalism for its appealing audacities and the principles that undergirded the field. We were purposeful, we were invincible, we were ablaze. That same year we were in grad school, CNN catapulted into history for broadcasting live television from Baghdad, where bombs were dropping. By...
read moreTo swim, to cry; Nancy’s package
“Is this Kelly Laura?” It was a she on my cell phone, someone I didn’t know. Someone who sounded like she wore thick eyeliner. Someone whose Russian accent made the question seem as if it were spreading itself onto a slab of dark bread. She said she was with Human Resources at the university where I’m teaching. The post office had called; I had a package. Fireworks went off just behind my heart and drizzled their hot tentacles all over my insides. My sunny friend Nancy emailed about a month ago asking for my street address and relaying that...
read morePaying it forward; The Sisters and The Shark
It was 1987. Prozac, disposable contact lenses and The Simpsons were introduced into American culture. The average gallon of gas was 89 cents, and airwaves were dominated by ’80s hair bands. No cellphones, no internet, no GPS. I moved to Miami that year and bought a car that seemed fitting: a heavily used, white, 1972 convertible Cadillac. The top was broken, the fins were speckled with rust holes, and the scruffy leather interior could accommodate a dozen NBA athletes. I called it The Shark. In September of 1987 Miami buzzed with Popemania....
read moreContents may have shifted; Do I have my things, or do my things have me?
“Those who know they have enough are rich.” — Lao Tzu I spent the December weeks before last Christmas boxing and storing my stuff to make way for an incoming tenant. Part Two of my holiday follies was folding into a torturous origami and cramming into two suitcases all the possessions I anticipated I would need to live abroad for a year. If we can put a man on the moon, can’t we reduce our material possessions into a handful of freeze-dried pellets that we could drop into water upon arrival and expand into an apartment upholstered with our...
read moreLost in translation; Startled by my mother tongue
It occurred to me when I saw the babushka tottering toward me on the sidewalk that she most likely did not understand the large English words on the front of her T-shirt: BLOW ME. What I immediately wanted was to make eye contact with someone nearby, someone like-minded whose look would fleetingly telegraph they thought this as odd and destabilizing as I did. That did not happen. What I wanted next was to stare. That also did not happen. Although she looked like a 70-something Kyrgyz grandmother, there is the possibility that the woman in the...
read moreMissing in action; Far from Flagstaff
It is May, and I’ve been away from Flagstaff for five months. It is our longest separation since I moved to town nine years ago. Most days I move through this yearlong decampment to Kyrgyzstan bustling with purpose and the rational understanding that this time away from home is temporary. I remember why I thought it was a solid idea to leave my community, my friends, my little outpost on the hill. This is not one of those days. And this is not a Letter from Home. It is a letter to home. A big, gooey love letter. Scrolling through my Facebook...
read moreUncle Brian; The Handsomest Man In The Whole Wide World
Fifty years ago, the Civil Rights Act was signed by President Lyndon Johnson, Beatlemania was in full bloom, a first-class stamp cost a nickel, and Ford rolled out the Mustang. I was seven. Fifty years ago the top stories in my life were becoming a first grader at St. Francis of Assisi School and the debut of the NBC television show Flipper. First grade starred Mrs. McGibney, patient and kindly and smelling of lilacs and baby powder. Flipper starred a dolphin and the character Porter Ricks, a dad and a ranger who was capable and dreamy and...
read morePostal love; A woman of letters
When I was in third grade, my grandmother and I began writing letters to one another. She lived with a smelly dachshund in a cottage on Mobile Bay in southern Alabama. I was her oldest grandchild growing up in a swarm of siblings in south Florida. I can’t recall the contours of her face with much clarity, but in the eye of my mind I can see her looping penmanship, the tiny ink blobs from her ballpoint pen and the flourish she added to her capital letters. She composed in tidy paragraphs and wrote on sensible stationary. Her letters glowed in...
read moreBecoming bilingual; The language of water and land
Water is my mother tongue. I grew up on a flat patch of landfill just north of Palm Beach called Singer Island, a place named after the 23rd child of Isaac Singer, the sewing machine millionaire. My family lived a blemish-free, resolutely middle-class life two blocks from the Atlantic Ocean. What I remember most about my childhood is the milky blue-green of the ocean and the light itch my skin felt when salt water dried on it. My mom shepherded us five kids to the beach almost every day. She filled a thermos with Fresca, packed a sheet and...
read moreAnd so it goes; Beginning again
The solstice has arced through and left its promises of light and longer days. Christmas, Boxing Day and Hanukkah are in the past tense, and once again we inch our way toward the trailhead of another year. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m done with the resolution business. All those lists taped to the fridge, the scoldy shoulds hidden beneath the frothy encouragements. Resolutions: the word is too muscular for the delicacy of something begun anew. Newness has its fragilities and needs its attentive watering to encourage the passage...
read moreComing clean; The confessions of a transvert
I’m not alone. There are others out there, but we’re a formless group with no T-shirts, no password, no secret handshake. We don’t have a 12-step program, a 10k run to fund research for our cause or celebrity endorsements. We live among you, as unseen by others as we can be to ourselves. We’re misunderstood, often misidentified, occasionally misdiagnosed. I write of what I know, but it’s taken me years to come clean and declare my true self. And now that I’ve come forward, the liberating relief is heady and...
read moreThe lessons of Scrabble; Good, better, best
I must have been in my late 20s when my mom and I started playing Scrabble together. Even though I fancied myself a wordsmith and trafficked in language for a living, I was a listless and half-hearted player, intimidated by my mom’s skill. To distance myself from the possibility I might not do well, I mocked the game. Goofy little tiles and point scoring: I called it stodgy, old person-ish and nerdy. My mom was in another camp. She relished the game, was an ace player and clearly enjoyed the mental iron pumping it gave her brain. She...
read moreCity of Diaries; I give you my word
My first diary was a shared one; I must have been 8 or 9. My best friend, Andrea, and I had one of those palm-sized starter diaries for girls with a pink cover, a cheap lock and a faint impression of Tinkerbell in the bottom corner of every page. We made only one entry: the Webster’s Dictionary definition of penis. With my unmoored handwriting, I copied the inscrutable definition into the diary. The very act of writing whatever I wanted into that private place was almost as darkly thrilling as the word we had searched for. I was in Catholic...
read moreMy funny friend; Elmo the clown
I was indentured at the University of Florida when I saw an ad in our campus newspaper looking for marketing managers for some unspecified “family focused” entertainment business. The ad promised the trifecta: travel, independence and big bucks. Well, big to me. I was a breakfast waitress in a restaurant lined with aquariums that smelled like dead fish. Even though I was in my senior year, close to the college finish line and anticipated an internship and subsequent job as a newspaper reporter, I had a dodgy relationship with patience and a...
read morePleasing Anna; Grandmother is hedgehog
It started with Zana and the Albanian lessons. When I turned 40, I moved to Albania for a year to teach journalism. Once there, I immediately hired a language teacher. Language is a decoder ring; three times a week I sat with Zana parroting the goofy, stilted dialogue that is the Albanian equivalent of Look Jane look! See Spot run! Zana stood no higher than my armpits, spoke no English and got down to business as soon as our appointed hour began. When I did well on my homework or mimicked a decent accent during oral pronunciation quizzes,...
read moreOrdinaria; Exalting in the everyday
“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” –George Eliot I visited New York City recently; my birthday coincided with an arts workshop I had flown there to attend. A longtime friend who lives in Manhattan offered to host a celebration and asked what I wanted. I told her something casual, low-key, come-as-you-are. “Most of all,” I said, “I want something that borders...
read moreThe tides of grief; Swimming through oatmeal
“The deeper the sorrow that carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” –Kahlil Gibran My father’s death in my mid-20s introduced me to grief and its idiosyncrasies. The sorrow I felt—and we all feel when we lose someone we love—had a language and texture all its own, one I’d never been versed in. Take a culture that is death averse, mix in a family upbringing intolerant of tears or sadness, and throw in a pinch of narcissistic control freak and there I was—bereft and fumbling with my response to loss. When would I be over...
read moreIt Takes a Poem; Living with poetry’s power
I went to grade school at St. Francis of Assisi, a Pepto Bismol-colored concrete building in the humid flatlands of South Florida. When I was in third grade, Sister Margaret Anina announced a poetry contest. I don’t remember that we were studying poetry or had learned much about it. Poetry back then was another unknown enterprise, and I had not learned to fear it. I just remember the contest. We were to choose a color and write a poem. I went for green and composed a three-stanza, singsongy bit of twaddle. It was my nine-year-old masterpiece....
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