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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In mid-January, a post from something called Februllage appeared in my Instagram stream. The post was dominated by a calendar of February with a word for each day. Beside the calendar, a small B&W collage of a schoolgirl wearing a hand-drawn crown and hoisting a pair of scissors significantly larger than her head. I clicked onto the post and read...
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Although Buffalo Park was a slip and slide mud festival after last week’s snowfall, I walked a mid-day lap on Sunday. People who had driven up the hill to see the snow clustered around the entry to the park, squealing as they made snowballs and snapped photos. I sloshed alone through the melting snow patches on the Nate Avery trail. About a half hour in, I...
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The year after I graduated from high school, I crisscrossed the U.S. in a flotilla of Greyhound buses with about 150 people my age. We were one of three traveling casts of Up With People, a wholesome performance troupe singing across small town America and spreading a message of global goodwill. I wasn’t selected because of my superior pipes or formal...
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It is the 1960s, and I am five. I’m with my mother in our suburban bathroom, watching her apply makeup. I am mesmerized. And I am imprinted. She holds her Maybelline oval cake of eyeliner under the faucet and coaxes a few drops of water, swirls it with a tiny brush, and swooshes it atop her lash line. She dabs at her nose with a powder puff. She...
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This summer I joined a large group of broken people. After a torqued misstep and a hard fall onto a broken sidewalk, I ripped my meniscus and watched my knee swell into what looked like a head of angry cauliflower. Inside, it felt like a batter of hot lava spiked with razor blades. As I awaited orthoscopic surgery in July, I hobbled around the house, ice...
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I used to write occasionally for the Miami Herald, my local daily newspaper. One day some years back I visited the newsroom to make changes to a story I’d submitted. I sat amidst the din, my head bent over a computer keyboard in pronounced concentration. “May I have your attention?” I looked up to see a knot of people. One woman carried a...
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About 20 years ago, I was awarded a Fulbright grant to teach journalism in Tirana, Albania, the capital city of what was then Europe’s poorest country. At that time, Albania lurched and sputtered in its rebranding from a mysterious Communist outpost to a capitalism-fueled democracy. When I arrived there, the country had no ATMs, no constitution and...
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About a decade ago I was invited by Dan, a jazz pianist, to be a participant at an artist’s retreat. I met Dan at a Nevada Arts Council meeting held in the conference room of a swanky Vegas mega-hotel. We were panelists awarding grants to arts organizations around the state. I could hear the faint musical encouragement of casino slot machines as we sat...
Read MoreMy father’s death in my mid-20s introduced me to grief. The sorrow I felt had a language and texture all its own. So I did what my journalism training taught me to do: drink more and dive into research. I learned about the stages of grieving, the physical symptoms, the scientific blah blah blah of it. Armed with all that information, I felt soothed and...
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It was late morning as I sat in an emptyish Munich airport cafe, bleary from a transatlantic flight. Six hours loomed before my connection to Sofia. I decided to spend the time drinking coffee and feeling sorry for myself. A smartly dressed older man and woman came to the table beside mine and laid down their carry-on bags, coats, water bottles and...
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It was in the late 1980s when I was indentured at the University of Florida and saw an ad in our campus newspaper looking for marketing managers for some unspecified “family focused” entertainment business. The ad promised the trifecta: travel, independence and big bucks. Even though I was in my senior year, close to the college finish line and anticipated...
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Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit. Helen Keller Mad respect to Helen Keller and her starchy endorsement of optimism, but I don’t subscribe to the notion that pessimists have never swashbuckled or furthered the...
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Each morning I ARISE, brush my TEETH, heat some WATER, make some TOAST and THINK about my day. But first I open Wordle, the tasty online word game less than a year old and more addictive than potato chips. In an interview with the BBC earlier this year, game inventor Josh Wardle said his aim was to make Wordle something akin to “a delightful snack.” And so...
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It was about a week ago, a late Thursday afternoon. Outside the classroom windows, golden hour saturated the light with amber. My advanced writing class had just concluded. Seven students Zooming in through laptops vanished from the checkerboard of faces on the projector screen in front of the room. At my university, we are hybrid teaching, a...
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On a muggy August day before my fifth grade school year was to begin, Mom circled my three brothers, my sister and me. She told us that we were moving to Indiantown, a scratchy, green patch of inland South Florida that we’d visited a few times. Indiantown was all I knew of “the country.” Mom said we’d be moving in a week and living in Indiantown in a...
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Fred went to prowl for vinyl. Audria was a frequent flyer who lasered in on collectible china. Aude and her husband had the eye for mid-century modern in the midst of cheap motel room castoffs. I was fixated on classroom globes from the USSR era. We weren’t a group, but almost every weekend we were regulars at The Bins, the unofficial name of a long gone...
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Longtime L’Oréal face Andie MacDowell showed up on my Facebook feed last week throwing shade on the anti-aging industrial complex. In an interview with The Zoe Report, MacDowell relayed that she was embracing her 63-year-old self by nixing hair coloring and showing her gray. After being cajoled by her children and living through the pandemic curtailment of...
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Photo by Jake Bacon I was a kid at the circus the first time I saw someone eat fire. The circus tent was darkened and a man stood on stage in a circle of light. He wore a sparkly jacket, removed his hat, bent his head back dramatically and used what looked like barbecue skewers to insert balls of fire into his mouth. He closed his lips around each fireball...
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A half dozen of us gathered recently for Easter dinner, a collection of single friends. Jazz, rack of lamb, Alsatian wine, animated conversations about politics. It felt like the Before Times. As we tucked into our dessert, the neighbors dropped in—a youngish couple with their 10-year-old son, Andre. About half of the group drifted to the balcony. Andre...
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When I was growing up, girls didn’t skateboard. Girls did the dishes. I wasn’t forbidden to skateboard, but it was a boy thing, a thing my brothers did. Back then, breaking into boy territory meant wearing pants to school. We had a long, sloping driveway beside our suburban house in central Florida. After school my brothers busted out the boards and...
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“I usually associate accordion music with Paris,” the audio story begins, “but I’m not in Paris. I’m in Sofia, Bulgaria… I teach here in Bulgaria, and usually I return to the States for the year-end holidays. But not this year.” Listen to the full audio story here.
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When I was about 8 years old, the scariest person I knew was a nun who taught fourth grade at my school: Sister Margaret Joseph. In my dreams Sister Margaret Joseph, or Maggie Joe as we called her, had a recurring, starring role. She mutated into a large bird with barbed wire talons and death-ray eyeballs that swooped down and pulled my hair for crimes...
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When I first moved to Flagstaff about 15 years ago, I taught 12th grade English at Northland Prep Academy. The class centered on close reading of a handful of texts. One of my choices was Tim O’Brien’s raw carnival of a book, “The Things They Carried,” a cluster of interlocking stories informed by O’Brien’s service in the Vietnam War. I have a freeze frame...
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This week, something a little different. Laura Kelly recorded this piece for Flagstaff Letter from...
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Queueing at the post office yesterday to send a package. Social distancing, masking. I joined the chorus of obliging customers, willing to take our turns. I felt patient and cooperative in my waiting. Video conferencing a week ago with my sibs to discuss our ailing mother. Four there, one late. We small talked and we waited. And then we waited some more. I...
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“Laughing and crying, you know it’s the same release.” —Joni Mitchell I made my way back to the United States last Saturday after the completion of a disorienting spring semester at my university in Bulgaria. The notion of flying internationally unleashed trepidation, but my primal need to be near my ailing mother in Florida was the stronger force. As I...
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My brother called last night just as I’d climbed under my covers. We traded stories about emotional numbness and our lapsed personal hygiene. I’ve spent the whole day wearing nothing but my underpants, he said. I countered with the admission that I hadn’t showered in five days. He told me that my nephew—his 25-year-old son living and working in New York...
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When my niece Carmen and her brother Lucas were children, I often babysat and stayed with them while their parents went on business trips. I am very close to my brother and sister-in-law. We lived in the same neighborhood, and I saw those kids almost every day. At times I felt like a third parent. But I am not a parent; I am something far more delicious. I...
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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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WARNING: CONTENT MAY BE OFFENSIVE OR DISTURBING TO SOME AUDIENCES. Trigger warnings—alerts that material may trigger someone to re-experience trauma—have been deployed more frequently in the past few years atop news stories, in university course syllabi, on signage accompanying art exhibitions. Offensive. Disturbing. Who decides for whom? The headlines and...
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Dear graduates, You have recently crossed a metaphoric threshold signified by diplomas decorated with inscrutable signatures. You wore a black mortar board and a muumuu. You radiated relief and accomplishment. Optimally, you are poised for change, ready to be launched and eager to embrace the next phase of your life. Realistically, you are stressed,...
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One of my favorite students, set to graduate summa cum laude this month, came to my office last week with a handful of books. She told me she had bought some for her literature classes and others to feed what I have come to know as her effervescent intellect. She said she was divesting of most of her possessions to prepare for a year of backpacking around...
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The poet W.S. Merwin died last month on the Ides of March. According to the Roman calendar, the Ides fall on the 15th. When Rome dominated Western civilization, the Ides of March was believed to have been a day to settle debts. Who knows what debt Merwin owed on this celestial plane. What many of us know is what he gave. His publishing house issued a...
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As I approached my apartment building in Sofia, Bulgaria, a few days ago, I saw a necrolog, the Bulgarian version of an obituary, pasted onto a window beside the front door. In the States we read obituaries in newspapers or on websites, but the Bulgarian way to announce a death is to make simple, letter-sized notices and distribute them into public life....
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It was Christmas Day 2007. My sister Julia, my friend Audria and I motored on I-40 from Albuquerque to Flagstaff through a light snow that blew sideways like confetti shot from a winter cannon. We had spent a few days in Santa Fe, reveling in the New Mexico slant on La Navidad—ambling down Canyon Road singing Christmas carols on streets lined by luminaria,...
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Last Tuesday, 23 of us sat around a sturdy conference table in the middle of our university classroom. It was my biweekly Advanced Writing for Media class, and the upcoming assignment: food memoir. Each student was to write a 1,000-word personal story about eating or cooking or something about food. Glorious food. Before the story writing was the...
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The news broke earlier this month on a Sunday. Viktoria Marinova, an investigative journalist, had been killed in Ruse, Bulgaria, a city in the northeast corner of this country. The Danube, on its epic flow, runs through Ruse. Bulgaria is on the river’s southern bank; Romania is to the north. Marinova’s death had been brutal, and the hypotheses swirled....
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In August I sold my car Thor to a friend’s daughter who lives in Salem, Oregon. I offered to drive Thor to her doorstep, envisioning a nostalgic road trip punctuated with serendipity and fertile solitude. I had begun my cross-country drive-a-thon earlier in the summer when I flew into Miami Beach, where I had deposited Thor before returning to the...
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In our fridge, the shelves lining the door are colonized by condiments. Shelf after shelf of condiments. The condiments jostle for limited real estate, obscure their labels behind the plastic railings that corral them into place and rattle a glass-on-glass chorus when the door is opened. Sound familiar? The rest of the fridge holds food from 2018. But the...
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Dear Flagstaff, I am sorry. Truly, madly, deeply sorry. If you’ve noticed an increase in mosquitoes this summer, I have to take the blame. If you’ve been ambushed by a swarm, if you’ve slapped more than the usual seasonal dose, if you’ve returned home from a walk in the forest with what looks like a constellation chart of bug bites on your arms and legs,...
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It was late afternoon earlier this week, day eight of my road trip from the tip of Florida up the East Coast to Vermont. It was time for coffee to fuel the next 200 miles I needed to bank to reach my final destination. I pulled off Interstate 88 in verdant, undulating eastern New York. Two women sitting on a stoop directed me to the town’s only coffee...
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This summer I went swimming, this summer I might have drowned, But I held my breath and I kicked my feet and I moved my arms around. This summer I swam in the ocean and I swam in a swimming pool Salt my wounds, chlorine my eyes, I’m a self-destructive fool. ~ “The Swimming Song” by Loudon Wainwright III When I was in my early 20s, I was a recent...
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Those who wish to sing always find a song. ~ Swedish proverb When I was in fourth grade, we got a new teacher at our Catholic school: Dr. Leone. She had tight, permed curls and a gruff voice. In the beginning I was a little afraid of her. We all were. She wasn’t mean to us, but her voice made her sound mad all the time, even when she wasn’t. I had...
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After seven years of being conscripted into Catholic school and wearing a uniform every day, I was thrilled when I deserted to public school because I could choose what I wore to school. But no pants. Though it was the 1970s, pants on females were still considered radioactive and radical. Pants were part of the school’s no-fly, dress code zone along...
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The first time I passed through a metal detector, I was walking into a high school to attend my first day of class in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I was 16 and an exchange student. It was my first solo experience abroad, and Sao Paulo was an eye-opening warren of skyscrapers, frenetic traffic and the kind of big city-ness I had only seen before on television. The...
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A month ago, I made a pilgrimage to Weeki Wachee, Florida, a dot of a city on the marshy Gulf side of the state at about the same latitude as Orlando. Weeki Wachee is little more than one square mile, has a population of 12 and is all about cold water. I went there to watch mermaid auditions. Weeki Wachee means little spring in the language of the Seminole...
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In early December last year, my friend Dan and I met in Amsterdam for a brief winter vacation. It was sunny, hat-and-gloves weather when we arrived. During the next few days, temperatures dropped and slushy snow fell with what felt like malicious zeal. The Dutch are stalwart bicycle riders, pedaling sturdy, black bikes that are the style equivalent of...
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I was living in Miami Beach when I turned 36. For my birthday, my friends pooled their money and gave me a fish. I named the fish Omar. Omar is an arcing, six-foot long Atlantic sailfish, a showy and regal sea creature adorned with a dorsal fin that stands like a starched cape along the length of its body. The bill is an elongated sword spackled with what...
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It was dark outside but warm—always warm and humid—when the truck dropped off the newspapers strung into bundles too heavy for me to lift. They thudded onto our front porch, divided into two or three stacks: the main section and the special sections to be tucked inside before we folded the paper into thirds and cinched each midsection with a rubber band....
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This is not a technophobe’s lament. This is not an anti-smartphone screed. This is an ode to the untethered glories of my July road trip without a screen, a signal or a network. The passenger manifest: me, my 12-year-old niece Eva, my beastly driving machine Thor, and all the gear and brio needed for six nights of camping in southern Utah. Her parents—my...
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It wasn’t my mother; my mother doesn’t watch soap operas. Maybe it was the woman who came over to iron and babysit some afternoons or the mother of one of my friends. The soap opera was “Days of Our Lives.” Even though it was about pretty grownups in shiny clothes doing mean things to each other, it wasn’t the show that mesmerized me; it was the opening. A...
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After I savor my morning cup of coffee, I walk the two-mile loop in Buffalo Park as my way of coming into the day. Morning Edition pipes into my skull, the mountains embolden and soothe with their nearness, and well-being coats my central nervous system. About a month ago, I was midway through my second lap in the park when I saw a man and woman stopped...
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I returned to South Florida last week for a family gathering. Humidity textured the air, temperatures edged into the low 90s, and thunderstorms rumbled each afternoon, shaking mangoes off trees and creating steamy, spectral patches that rose from the baked asphalt. Under an overcast sky and a warm, weak rain, I rode my bicycle home from a friend’s house...
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Last Thursday as two friends and I loaded the truck for our road trip to a music festival, we paused in front of 60 red roses corralled in a bucket on my friend’s kitchen counter. “What should I do with these?” she asked. Her 60th birthday had been the day before; the long stems were a gift from her husband. The blooms were open, showing off their...
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It was the Thursday before Easter. I faced 23 university students clustered around a conference table. We were just past the halfway mark of our course called Writing for the Ear. Today we are going on a soundwalk, I said. No talking, no texting. Remain silent and amble behind me at a comfortable pace. Try to take in the world through sound. Turn down your...
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It was a fall night. A friend was helping to present an acoustic music concert at the Unitarian church in Doney Park. She was stationed in the lobby, selling tickets. I didn’t know anyone else there, so I sat by myself until a man edged into the seat beside mine. A woman was behind him. They held hands. As soon as he settled into his chair, he turned...
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It was in the evening a few Mondays ago, and the city center was empty as I walked home from the university. I rounded the corner onto a side street. About half-a-dozen kids huddled in front of a shuttered storefront just outside of the cone of light the streetlamp cast. We were the only people around. From their height I pegged them at about...
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I caught an episode of The Twilight Zone last night. A grade school-aged sister and brother sit beside a pool with wet hair. Towels drape their bony shoulders. The father looks dressed for work; the mom looks as if she is off to the country club for mahjong and Mai Tais. The parents glare at one another and give the children the news: We don’t like each...
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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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I motored westward on I-40 toward Death Valley. My car, Thor, was loaded with gear, a funk CD compiled by DJ Don Durango, and directions to a top-secret campsite with views reputed to induce something akin to Nirvana. I was little more than an hour into my getaway when I nosed up behind a swarm of RVs living large in both lanes, chugging away at top speeds...
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I read Abbey’s quote last Wednesday morning. It was typed onto a sheet of white paper and posted on a bulletin board in the Mojave National Preserve. The taste of freedom and the smell of danger sound a little like the mantra of a Cold War spy, but Abbey’s words about wilderness become an anthem in the vast high desert of the Mojave, one of my treasured...
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Once more my deeper life goes on with more strength, as if the banks through which it moves had widened out. — Ranier Maria Rilke You get the call. You have gotten the call. You will get the call. Mine came from one of my brothers a few weeks ago. Flat voice, naked, no artificial sweetener: “You need to get here, Laura. She is in the intensive care unit,...
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I had dinner with a friend last week; she is about 20 years younger. We were next door neighbors a while back, and a friendship bloomed between us even though a generation separates us. She is radiant and thoughtful, and our friendship continues the way it began—unedited candor and shared problem solving about whatever our hearts grapple with. As we traded...
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Sunday morning. All Saints Day. I had spent the night at a friend’s house; a group of us were there tucked into a honeycomb of bedrooms. In the wake of the previous evening’s Halloween shenanigans, we all awoke slowly and shambled toward the kitchen to begin the sacred ritual of coffee making. We clutched our mugs and stood around the kitchen counter. In...
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I didn’t recognize the incoming phone number when I took the call last week. It was a friend from college days. He and I have kept in touch over the years, but he lives in Florida, he’s not a big Facebook guy, and it’s been three years or so since we’ve seen one another or conversed.
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When my 21-year-old niece Carmen moved in with me six months ago, we visited the Humane Society one rainy Sunday to select a cat to bring into our petless lives. Before we got there, I decreed that the animal would be named Walter Cronkite, no matter the gender. Carmen was unfazed. She knew of my propensity for naming cats after broadcast...
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A few weeks ago I was staying the night at a friend’s house. It was well past dinnertime. Clean dishes nestled into the drying rack, and a spirited conversation had ebbed. My friend’s 6-year-old daughter held my hand as she guided me up the stairs to the guest room. I kissed her good night and told her I was going to sleep. “But where do you go?” she...
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I am 13 or 14. It’s a school night. Mom and I work in the kitchen, rattling plates into the dishwasher. My brothers and sister cluster in our wood-paneled family room watching Adam 12. Dad is away on business. I ask my mother about love: When does it come? How will I know? What was it like to fall in love? Mom answers matter-of-factly. Her tone suggests...
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I was 7 or 8 when Mom enrolled me and my younger sister in ballet class with Miss Eileen. Even though I am more of a jazz hands and tap dance kind of girl, I was enthralled with the shoes and the costumes, the pale and milky leotards, the discipline. Someone decrepit sat at the piano plinking music. Lines of coltish girls followed Miss Eileen’s...
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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 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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It wasn’t that long ago, late October, mid-day, mid-week. I was in a classroom on the third floor of our four-story university building, readying the projector for a PowerPoint I was going to present when my storytelling class began in about five minutes. Above the din and swirl of students in the hallway, I heard what sounded like a bell and then an...
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I rendezvoused with a graduate school friend a few weekends ago. Verena and I were in a class of about three dozen journalists who marauded Washington, D.C., in 1990. Most of us were print reporters. All of us were swashbucklers, young and hungry, enamored of journalism for its appealing audacities and the principles that undergirded the field. We were...
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“Is this Kelly Laura?” It was a she on my cell phone, someone I didn’t know. Someone who sounded like she wore thick eyeliner. Someone whose Russian accent made the question seem as if it were spreading itself onto a slab of dark bread. She said she was with Human Resources at the university where I’m teaching. The post office had called; I had a package....
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It was 1987. Prozac, disposable contact lenses and The Simpsons were introduced into American culture. The average gallon of gas was 89 cents, and airwaves were dominated by ’80s hair bands. No cellphones, no internet, no GPS. I moved to Miami that year and bought a car that seemed fitting: a heavily used, white, 1972 convertible Cadillac. The top was...
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“Those who know they have enough are rich.” — Lao Tzu I spent the December weeks before last Christmas boxing and storing my stuff to make way for an incoming tenant. Part Two of my holiday follies was folding into a torturous origami and cramming into two suitcases all the possessions I anticipated I would need to live abroad for a year. If we can put a...
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It occurred to me when I saw the babushka tottering toward me on the sidewalk that she most likely did not understand the large English words on the front of her T-shirt: BLOW ME. What I immediately wanted was to make eye contact with someone nearby, someone like-minded whose look would fleetingly telegraph they thought this as odd and destabilizing as I...
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It is May, and I’ve been away from Flagstaff for five months. It is our longest separation since I moved to town nine years ago. Most days I move through this yearlong decampment to Kyrgyzstan bustling with purpose and the rational understanding that this time away from home is temporary. I remember why I thought it was a solid idea to leave my community,...
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Fifty years ago, the Civil Rights Act was signed by President Lyndon Johnson, Beatlemania was in full bloom, a first-class stamp cost a nickel, and Ford rolled out the Mustang. I was seven. Fifty years ago the top stories in my life were becoming a first grader at St. Francis of Assisi School and the debut of the NBC television show Flipper. First grade...
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When I was in third grade, my grandmother and I began writing letters to one another. She lived with a smelly dachshund in a cottage on Mobile Bay in southern Alabama. I was her oldest grandchild growing up in a swarm of siblings in south Florida. I can’t recall the contours of her face with much clarity, but in the eye of my mind I can see her looping...
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Water is my mother tongue. I grew up on a flat patch of landfill just north of Palm Beach called Singer Island, a place named after the 23rd child of Isaac Singer, the sewing machine millionaire. My family lived a blemish-free, resolutely middle-class life two blocks from the Atlantic Ocean. What I remember most about my childhood is the milky blue-green...
Read MoreThe solstice has arced through and left its promises of light and longer days. Christmas, Boxing Day and Hanukkah are in the past tense, and once again we inch our way toward the trailhead of another year. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m done with the resolution business. All those lists taped to the fridge, the scoldy shoulds hidden beneath...
Read MoreI’m not alone. There are others out there, but we’re a formless group with no T-shirts, no password, no secret handshake. We don’t have a 12-step program, a 10k run to fund research for our cause or celebrity endorsements. We live among you, as unseen by others as we can be to ourselves. We’re misunderstood, often misidentified,...
Read MoreI must have been in my late 20s when my mom and I started playing Scrabble together. Even though I fancied myself a wordsmith and trafficked in language for a living, I was a listless and half-hearted player, intimidated by my mom’s skill. To distance myself from the possibility I might not do well, I mocked the game. Goofy little tiles and point scoring:...
Read MoreMy first diary was a shared one; I must have been 8 or 9. My best friend, Andrea, and I had one of those palm-sized starter diaries for girls with a pink cover, a cheap lock and a faint impression of Tinkerbell in the bottom corner of every page. We made only one entry: the Webster’s Dictionary definition of penis. With my unmoored handwriting, I copied...
Read MoreI was indentured at the University of Florida when I saw an ad in our campus newspaper looking for marketing managers for some unspecified “family focused” entertainment business. The ad promised the trifecta: travel, independence and big bucks. Well, big to me. I was a breakfast waitress in a restaurant lined with aquariums that smelled like dead fish....
Read MoreIt started with Zana and the Albanian lessons. When I turned 40, I moved to Albania for a year to teach journalism. Once there, I immediately hired a language teacher. Language is a decoder ring; three times a week I sat with Zana parroting the goofy, stilted dialogue that is the Albanian equivalent of Look Jane look! See Spot run! Zana stood no higher...
Read More“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” –George Eliot I visited New York City recently; my birthday coincided with an arts workshop I had flown there to attend. A longtime...
Read More“The deeper the sorrow that carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” –Kahlil Gibran My father’s death in my mid-20s introduced me to grief and its idiosyncrasies. The sorrow I felt—and we all feel when we lose someone we love—had a language and texture all its own, one I’d never been versed in. Take a culture that is death averse, mix...
Read MoreI went to grade school at St. Francis of Assisi, a Pepto Bismol-colored concrete building in the humid flatlands of South Florida. When I was in third grade, Sister Margaret Anina announced a poetry contest. I don’t remember that we were studying poetry or had learned much about it. Poetry back then was another unknown enterprise, and I had not learned to...
Read MoreIt’s a Thursday afternoon, halfway through the school year. My 11th and 12th graders file in for English class. “Are we reading today, Ms. Kelly?” Tyler asks as he holds up his copy of “The Lovely Bones.” We are, I tell him. The room hushes. The students open their books and lower their heads. One by one, we circle the room; each reads a few paragraphs...
Read MoreI spent the first 18 years of my life living in South Florida where I spoke the language of sand, intuited the rhythms of the ocean, and trafficked in seashells. All this worked just fine for the wallpaper of my young life until this time of year rolled around. I wanted snow. Christmas television shows featured well-groomed people in coats delighted by...
Read MoreNovember 2, 1999. It is late afternoon when I board the train from Bratislava to Budapest. I’ve taken this three-hour train ride down the spine of Eastern Europe every Wednesday for the past two months, as I commute from my home in the Slovak capital city to the Hungarian capital city to teach. My coat stays on as I slide into an empty car. The seats are...
Read MoreIt’s 2001, and I live in Slovakia, an overlookable country with a language light on vowels. I’ve been here in Bratislava, the capital city, long enough to decode the essentials and enjoy the superficial mastery that bleeds into a muted smugness peculiar to ex-pats. But I’ve not been here long enough for social fluency. Instead I know just enough to be...
Read MoreLate August in Flagstaff. Outside it rains cold, fat and purposeful drops. I’m inside, and reminded by NPR about the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew. In a shimmering flash I am back in Miami Beach, back in Florida, back enfolded in the landscape that forged me. The water and salt. The crippling humidity and hot weather mania. A tribe of beloveds...
Read MoreMy father died unexpectedly when I was 26 years old. My parents divorced when I was in high school; my mother remarried and moved to New Zealand. On the day of my father’s death, my brothers and sister and I tearfully converged at his two-bedroom home to divvy up his meager worldly possessions: thousands of tools, books and some dour artwork that used to...
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