During Covid, one of things I missed most was fleeting encounters with strangers. The cashier at the grocery store, the seatmate on a plane, the person behind me in a slow-moving line. More often than not, I am a person who talks with strangers. Often I prefer them to talking with people I know. With strangers, I can gauge and widen my understanding of how...
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On a July day before my fifth grade school year began, Mom and Dad circled my three brothers, my sister and me. 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 acres of palmetto scrub. We’d live in a doublewide trailer encircled by some scraggly...
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Phil Donahue, whose 29-year, groundbreaking talk show spanned from the late 60s to the late 90s, died a few weeks ago at the age of 88. Headlines called him a talk show icon, a free speech champion, a pioneer. His New York Timesobituary dubbed him the king of daytime television. When Donahue began his show in Ohio in 1967, Lyndon Johnson was president, the...
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Last week, in the lazy thick of summer, my friend V and I woke up in her lake house, a small cottage on the edge of a town with no stoplights, no commerce, no noise. I read, she wrote, I napped, we hiked. The hours noodled on. The day was more like a cloud than a parking lot, and the unstructuredness of it all invited a burst of joy that I could only...
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My first nickname was Awie, not the gooiest name as it falls onto the ear, but it was mine. Brother #1, two years younger than me, came up with the name when he was first learning to talk and couldn’t navigate the L or R in Laura. Awie stuck with the durable adhesive of childhood nicknames even though it had a narrow circumference. Awie was solely a family...
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