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...
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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,...
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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...
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“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...
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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...
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