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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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