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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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