As I pull weeds from the garden beds that, last year, yielded a handful of arugula and four withered peas, I tell my wife, “Maybe it will be different this time.” In the 1989 film adaptation of Pet Sematary, this is the same line the main character repeats to himself and God as he buries one body after the next in the haunted graveyard, only to finally,...
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When I was a little girl, my step-grandfather made my siblings and me small cedar chests with bronze hinges. I’ve kept mine. Ever since I left home for college, it’s moved with me. Inside are decades of concert ticket stubs (Violent Femmes, Blur, Morrissey), postcards from Wisconsin, Bali, France, notes from friends that date back to my junior year in high...
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My wife calls them “smallidays”—small holidays, St. Patrick’s Day, Labor Day, Valentine’s Day. Last month, as I glumly removed ornaments and got ready to chuck our tree, she reminded me, “There’s still a bunch of smallidays to look forward to…” This was little comfort as I haven’t put stock in those holidays since I was a kid. Most years I don’t even...
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Over winter break I spent some time listening to a podcast and reading a book about The Donner Party. While I would like to say I became spontaneously interested in Westward Expansion or the notion of Manifest Destiny, the truth is a friend made a reference to the Donner Party during a conversation and I was reminded of this little American History blip...
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Last week was World AIDS Day, it snowed in Flagstaff, George H.W. Bush died and my AP Literature class began reading Tony Kushner’s Angels in America — a play about AIDS, ancestry, politics, community, America itself. The present moment often has a way of colliding with my curriculum. About this, I feel conflicted. On one hand, my students and I...
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