My Imperfect America; Of losers, winners, and washing machines

Posted by on Dec 5, 2024 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on My Imperfect America; Of losers, winners, and washing machines

My Imperfect America; Of losers, winners, and washing machines

If the ‘50s was not a shining moment in human history, the decade at least landed us with an abundance of game shows. Truth or Consequences, The Price Is Right, Queen for a Day, and a few years later, Let’s Make a Deal. These were the four that played at our house, and I considered it daytime TV at its finest. How I became a game show aficionado puzzled me for years. Why wasn’t I in school or playing with my friends? These shows aired in the morning or early afternoon yet somehow I can picture myself, a little kid lounging on a rug the color...

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Mess

Posted by on Oct 24, 2024 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Mess

Mess

The story goes that when my father’s parents divorced when he was eight, the reason given was not infidelity, moral lassitude, or drunkenness, but messiness. Theirs was an example of the inability of two people to share a life when one was messy and one was neat. There are many apocryphal stories in my family and this may be one of them, but I suspect there’s truth at its core. I remember my grandfather as a buttoned-up man whose passion was fishing. He tied his own flies—an incredibly exacting art—and was a beautiful skier. If you could meet...

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Way Stations Remembered; One traveler’s tollbooth fandom

Posted by on Sep 12, 2024 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Way Stations Remembered; One traveler’s tollbooth fandom

Way Stations Remembered; One traveler’s tollbooth fandom

Every summer I make a pilgrimage to New England where I did some of my growing up. In a rented car I drive the familiar roads of Massachusetts and Maine, reacquainting myself with humidity and the color green. The farther north I go the fewer people there are, and along the coast the air cools and becomes salty. I don’t pull off the highway to find a bowl of fish chowder or a lobster roll, though I wish I were the kind of person that did that even just once. One thing I’ve learned about travel is it puts you right up against who you are,...

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Breakfast with the Captain

Posted by on Aug 1, 2024 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Breakfast with the Captain

Breakfast with the Captain

When I was a chubby five-year-old in puffed sleeves and shiny red shoes, and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I had one answer: I want to be famous. I had learned not to say I wanted to be a fireman. Everyone laughed at that. But I couldn’t say what people expected, a teacher or a nurse. I didn’t want to be a teacher or a nurse. My first grade teacher scolded me for coloring outside the lines, and coloring a cow red, so being an artist was out. Sea captain brought the same reaction as fireman, and really after that, what...

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A Portable Notion; Meditations on home

Posted by on Jun 20, 2024 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on A Portable Notion; Meditations on home

A Portable Notion; Meditations on home

Here, two big winter storms brought a few trees down. The grass is lush and the ferns my mother planted have grown in and spread along the new drainage ditch. The place looks cared for, as my parents used to care for it. The driveway has a fresh load of gravel and the house a new coat of paint. I got here last night and even in the dark I could sense the changes wrought by time and weather and us, my sisters and brothers and me, who have a long relationship with this particular three acres. This is our home spot on the long coast of Maine,...

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A Wild Affection; In praise of the pickups

Posted by on May 9, 2024 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on A Wild Affection; In praise of the pickups

A Wild Affection; In praise of the pickups

If you’ve never listened to the Hot Country Knights singing “Pick Her Up,” you may not be interested in reading any further because this Letter From Home is basically a paean to pickup trucks, including the lyrics they inspire. An example of this brilliance is: “If you wanna do right on a Saturday night/This is all you’ve gotta do/…Pick her up in a pickup truck.” And: “Yeah, buddy, she ain’t got no use for a BMW/Or wine from a hundred dollar bottle/She’d rather bounce around in the outskirts of town/Shotgunnin’ in a muddy Silverado.” To watch...

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Adrift in the Floating City; A traveler considers home

Posted by on Apr 4, 2024 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Adrift in the Floating City; A traveler considers home

Adrift in the Floating City; A traveler considers home

Ever since reading Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, I’ve approached the art of the passeggiata with a new sense of awe. Far from being a simple feat of forward movement, a stroll is an act of discovery, a gourmet meal of the senses. We prowl and sniff and stop and listen and sniff again, just like the four-footers we know. Sometimes we’re purposeful, ticking off the miles from one place to another. Sometimes we’re dreamy, stopping at the pasticceria for a sfogliatella, or pausing under an open window on a narrow street to eavesdrop on the...

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The Trials of Now

Posted by on Jan 25, 2024 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on The Trials of Now

The Trials of Now

When I was a kid and admittedly a little on the self-centered side, I thought I would someday write an advice column for my hometown newspaper, the New York Times. I decided I would call it Dear Me, ME being my initials. The cleverness of that faded over time, as did the ambition to give anyone anywhere advice. But now I’m back at it, though you won’t find pearls of wisdom here, only a few pebbles I’ve carried in my pocket over the years. Some of them came home with me from the river, others I picked up off the road, and yet others were good...

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Tales of the Inverted Jenny and Other Philatelic Surprises

Posted by on Dec 14, 2023 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Tales of the Inverted Jenny and Other Philatelic Surprises

Tales of the Inverted Jenny and Other Philatelic Surprises

As a kid, nothing pleased me more than to hear a grownup cut loose with a volley of curse words. I was an East Coast city girl; we didn’t say “cussing.” We said “swearing” but that was confusing because sometimes you were meant to swear, to promise you weren’t the one who made the crank calls to the elderly neighbor or clogged the toilet with paper towels. The use of naughty and forbidden words was music to my ears, a whole string of them a symphony. I didn’t have to understand what was said, it was the way in which it was said that intrigued...

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The Future Has an Electric heart; A cautionary tale

Posted by on Nov 9, 2023 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on The Future Has an Electric heart; A cautionary tale

The Future Has an Electric heart; A cautionary tale

Good morning from the parking lot behind Darling’s Auto in Augusta, Maine where I’ve spent the night in fetal position on the back seat of my electric vehicle, waiting the required seven hours for it to charge. Oh, it’s a wonder, this new form of transportation. Drive awhile, wait awhile; drive and charge, drive and charge. What’s time to a weary traveler? A parking lot can feel like home! Yes, this could have been my fate but for a sliver of luck. In another scenario, I and my Chevy Bolt might have arrived at our destination on the back of a...

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Brookie; A story for the season

Posted by on Sep 28, 2023 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Brookie; A story for the season

Brookie; A story for the season

My grandfather was a slender man with a high forehead and immaculate hands. He was a fly fisherman, and the reason we didn’t see him often was because he fished all over the world instead of staying home in Connecticut with his family. My father was his son. My father wasn’t a slender man; he was of normal bulk and had a full head of hair. His hands weren’t especially this way or that. As he aged they became arthritic, as did his shoulders, hips and knees. The story of my grandfather is a story with a hole in it. I hardly knew him, and I...

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Committed to Memory; Bradbury, book banning, and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Posted by on Aug 17, 2023 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Committed to Memory; Bradbury, book banning, and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Committed to Memory; Bradbury, book banning, and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

When I was a freshman in college, I decided to memorize “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It was a weird year for me. I was living in a converted lounge, the best the formerly all-male college could do to accommodate its new female students. My dorm room had a beige linoleum floor, stark white walls, no windows, and two bunk beds placed randomly in the antiseptic space. Going to sleep on one of the top bunks, I felt like a patient in an operating theater. After a week, one roommate had a breakdown and left, and I decided to bring a...

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Remnants of Summers Past; Remembering beaches

Posted by on Jul 6, 2023 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Remnants of Summers Past; Remembering beaches

Remnants of Summers Past; Remembering beaches

It’s been 270 million years since Flagstaff might have advertised itself as a beach destination. Not the kind with vendors and umbrellas, boardwalks and roller bladers, people large and small squirming with sunburn and spilling out of their swimsuits. No humans—no mammals at all—no birds, not even dinosaurs roamed these shores. The ocean’s evidence is there in the top layer of the Grand Canyon, the Kaibab layer where, if you poke around and keep your eyes open you can find once-living treasures turned to stone. Perfect scallop shells or their...

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A Blind Date with Freedom

Posted by on May 25, 2023 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on A Blind Date with Freedom

A Blind Date with Freedom

My first day in prison went better than I expected. The guards were patient with me, even when I was stuck for several minutes in a sort of no man’s land between two heavy doors, a security zone with cameras set too high to record the presence of a five-foot tall person. It took some jumping and waving on my part to activate the inside door, and by then I was late for class. I was just out of graduate school, and this was my first real job, teaching creative writing in the prison complex on the outskirts of Tucson. It was a maximum security...

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A Subway Runs Through It – The hidden pleasures of a city childhood

Posted by on Apr 13, 2023 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on A Subway Runs Through It – The hidden pleasures of a city childhood

A Subway Runs Through It  – The hidden pleasures of a city childhood

The story goes that my sister Julia, newly arrived at UC Santa Cruz, was sitting in class on the afternoon of October 17, 1989, when the ground began to tremble. The class was a large lecture class and Julia watched in amazement as dozens of her fellow PhD students jumped up from their seats and ran for the doorways. Believing it was nothing but the rumble of the subway, which being a New Yorker she was used to, she stayed put. It only crossed her mind a few minutes later that Santa Cruz had no subway but it did sit along the San Andreas...

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 The Intimacy of the Pen; how handwriting can save civilization

Posted by on Mar 2, 2023 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on  The Intimacy of the Pen; how handwriting can save civilization

 The Intimacy of the Pen; how handwriting can save civilization

I missed a big chunk of first grade because I was laid up with tuberculosis. As a result, by the time I hit second grade I could barely write my name. Everyone else in the class, I noticed, published themselves every chance they got. In blocky letters they scrawled their names across the blackboard, chalked them on the benches in the playground and on the seats of the swings. They bore down heavily with their pencils until they tore holes in their paper, so ferocious was their desire to call attention to their existence, to show off a name...

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Anatomy of a Goodbye

Posted by on Jan 26, 2023 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Anatomy of a Goodbye

Anatomy of a Goodbye

Often our partings are so frequent and casual we don’t even consider the weight of goodbye. Until the bed is empty, the pills and liquid morphine taken to the police station to be destroyed. Easier to comprehend the finality of medicine than the finishing of a human life. Today is my 70th birthday. Today I pass out of the tenuous grip of late middle age. Today time feels shorter than yesterday—an accurate reading of the temporal situation—and yet there is nothing I can or want to do to lengthen its grip, to recover it. Last week someone dear...

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Syllables of Praise; Good medicine for the grieving times

Posted by on Dec 15, 2022 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Syllables of Praise; Good medicine for the grieving times

Syllables of Praise; Good medicine for the grieving times

The man was dressed in stiff new Carhartt’s, a red flannel shirt and sheepskin vest. At his feet lay a mutt of disputable parentage—part pointer dog, part pit bull, a smattering of Labrador retriever. She lay uncomfortably, which I noticed was due to a bloated belly. Her large brown eyes were misty with cataracts, her soft muzzle tested the air.  As I came out of the examination room where I’d left my own pup for a teeth cleaning, I caught sight of her lying on the floor at her master’s feet. He held her leash loosely and gazed across the...

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Through a Polished Window; A glimpse inside the heart of Halloween

Posted by on Oct 27, 2022 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Through a Polished Window; A glimpse inside the heart of Halloween

Through a Polished Window; A glimpse inside the heart of Halloween

When I first arrived in town—this town—in 1979, it was a low-built place, home to thirty-thousand people, all of whom seemed to know one another either by blood relation, marriage, or friendship. And romance, of course, for we were overwhelmingly young and romantic. Like many of us, I came to town in order to be closer to the canyon. The canyon always meant Grand Canyon, just as the river always meant the Colorado. It was easy to get on the river if you had a flexible life and were willing to cook or scrub pots or both, and sometimes someone...

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A Life of Letters

Posted by on Sep 8, 2022 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on A Life of Letters

A Life of Letters

Every Monday through Saturday, when I hear the clink of the mailbox lid, I remember a time in my early twenties when, dazed by all the career choices for which I didn’t qualify, I decided to give my life to the United States Postal Service. I didn’t have any idea how to make this happen, but I knew why I wanted it to happen, starting with my affection for our local New York City post office where, even before my head reached an inch above the counter, I was fascinated by the little cubicle in which sat a postal employee named Barnes, an older...

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Interdependence Day; Meditations on Indra’s net

Posted by on Jul 14, 2022 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Interdependence Day; Meditations on Indra’s net

Interdependence Day; Meditations on Indra’s net

The town of Wellfleet, Massachusetts, is famous for its oysters, its beaches and its Interdependence Day parade. The parade takes place on the Fourth of July as neighboring Cape Cod towns are hosting their own celebrations, but only in Wellfleet is the notion of independence scrapped for the higher ideal of interdependence. It seems to me, especially given a recent turn of fortune that has put me on crutches, we could all use a little more acknowledgment of our interdependence. A Vietnamese monk named Thich Nhat Hanh called it “interbeing,”...

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To Find Home

Posted by on Jun 2, 2022 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on To Find Home

To Find Home

Sometimes I just want to tell you who I am and where I come from, forget the need to write and polish a piece for a newspaper column. I want to leave behind my professional training, my writing skills, my accomplishments, and open the heart’s door. I’d start at the beginning if I knew where that was. Oh, so many ways to tell a story. I’ll just say there was a long time in my life when I was on a journey to find my people, to find home. When I came out in 1982, only ten years had passed since a psychiatrist named Dr. John Fryer donned a...

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Walking the Wall; Where poetry and presidency intersect

Posted by on Apr 21, 2022 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Walking the Wall; Where poetry and presidency intersect

Walking the Wall; Where poetry and presidency intersect

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. These are the words of Robert Frost in his poem, “Mending Wall.” It’s been years since I sat down and read that poem. I spent most of the month of March thinking about walls and I was curious about what the old Vermonter had to say. If you’ve never read it, please do. Two neighbors are walking the wall between their properties. One of them is in favor of maintaining a visible and solid demarcation, and the other, the poet, wonders exactly why a wall is necessary. Good fences make good neighbors,...

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Here, again; The war in which we lived

Posted by on Mar 10, 2022 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Here, again; The war in which we lived

Here, again; The war in which we lived

It’s the second day of March. This won’t go to print for more than a week. We all know what a week can bring. It was exactly a week ago that Ukrainians woke up to their country at war. But I am writing this now because the moment feels more important than a newspaper timeline. And because acts of aggression are timeless. Our friend Laura Kelly writes from Bulgaria where she is teaching journalism: 26 Ukrainian students on campus. Palpable dread, distress among students and profs. Refugees coming into Bulgaria over the Romanian border. It...

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Pockets: A history

Posted by on Dec 30, 2021 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Pockets: A history

Pockets: A history

There sometimes arises a subject matter so unextraordinary, so taken for granted, that by its own pedestrian nature it becomes something of a rockstar. I hope you’ll agree with me that this is certainly the case with pockets. Pockets. Those rectangular appendages we’ve come to count on, those utilitarian bits of fabric we entrust our lives too, lives that include wallets, phones or a tin of chewing tobacco. Personally, I carry a copy of the Constitution in my back pocket, thinking someday I’ll read it from beginning to end. I’ve seen stranger...

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Finding our way in the dark; Sextants, telescopes, and a mother’s advice

Posted by on Nov 18, 2021 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Finding our way in the dark; Sextants, telescopes, and a mother’s advice

Finding our way in the dark; Sextants, telescopes, and a mother’s advice

Among my mother’s possessions when she died was a wooden box, a box exactly the size of the one in which we buried her ashes. It had a sticky latch, a latch that seemed to tell us no, not yet, there are other tasks to take care of. So for weeks the box sat where it had always sat, under a table—a handsome mahogany table—beside a bookcase filled with dozens of books written about cruising the Maine coast. On top of the bookcase was a stack of every navigational chart imaginable from Block Island to Penobscot Bay and on up to New Brunswick. My...

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Moving Democracy Forward

Posted by on Oct 7, 2021 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Moving Democracy Forward

Moving Democracy Forward

The history of people gathering to protest, or marching to make their minds known, is a long one. Often peaceful by intent, and just as often the last stop before violence, every protest march is one side of a conversation, a monologue inviting dialogue. Or an act of extreme frustration, Not-Power speaking to Power and not being heard. Before this young country came to be, the cry of No taxation without representation fell on deaf ears until a crowd of colonists with anti-royalist sentiments stepped aboard a British ship in Boston Harbor. Wet...

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Old bones, good bones

Posted by on Aug 26, 2021 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Old bones, good bones

Old bones, good bones

My neighbor took a panel of siding off his house a few days ago in order to replace an outdoor faucet. Because I’m a bit of a structural archeologist, I was curious and went over early in the morning to take a closer look. The first layer under the siding was stucco, and under that, chicken wire. It was old chicken wire, a different gauge than you see today. Under that layer was wooden clapboard. I recognized it as the same narrow clapboard I’d found under the stucco at my house. It was unharmed, sound, in perfect shape. If you wanted to, you...

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A complication in cordage – The international language of knots

Posted by on Jul 15, 2021 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on A complication in cordage – The international language of knots

A complication in cordage – The international language of knots

When you hang around with truckers and sailors you learn the language of knots. Climbers and wranglers, arborists and roustabouts — they speak this language too. You can go anywhere in the world and find someone tying a bowline. It may be called by a different name, but it’s the same configuration: the rabbit goes out of the hole, around the tree and back into the hole. In places without trees or rabbits you’ll still find bowlines. My grandmother had a schooner left to her by her stepfather when he died. He died the year I was born and we...

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The bomb in the bed: asana, religion, and the doomed path of certainty

Posted by on May 27, 2021 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on The bomb in the bed: asana, religion, and the doomed path of certainty

The bomb in the bed: asana, religion, and the doomed path of certainty

Last week, the Alabama legislature reversed a 1993 ruling that prohibited teaching yoga in the public schools. The new ruling came with a caveat: yoga okay, but no Oms, no namastes, no Sanskrit names for the postures. To call the postures asanas, which is everyday yoga-speak, that too would be a no-no, as would the practice of meditation, guided imagery, or anything that hinted at the existence of an Eastern philosophy. Alabama has made clear that its population will not be shifting from Christianity to Hindu or Buddhist gobbledygook any time...

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Eyes on Burma; A portrait of a people and their country

Posted by on Apr 8, 2021 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Eyes on Burma; A portrait of a people and their country

Eyes on Burma; A portrait of a people and their country

In the late 1990s I traveled with a friend to what was then called Burma, and is now called Myanmar. We never intended to go to Burma; our plan was to explore Thailand, and perhaps move on to India after that. We even obtained visas for Egypt in case we still had itchy feet. I had never been to Asia, and in my journal I described Bangkok, where we landed, as one of Dante’s inventions, the diabolical setting for his Inferno. It was a city awake all night, not in the orderly way New York is awake all night, but in the steamy, honking,...

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Let me tell you; The stormy birth of story

Posted by on Mar 4, 2021 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Let me tell you; The stormy birth of story

Let me tell you; The stormy birth of story

Who among us has not been comforted by the words, Let me tell you a story? In my family it was my father who held the talking stick. He was not only a brilliant exaggerator, but he and his three brothers learned the gift of Blarney from their mother who learned it from her Irish grandfather who, we were told, did a short shift as the mayor of New York City. This honor was bestowed on him after he jumped from a ferry to save a woman overboard in New York harbor. You see? Already the stories are piling upon stories, which makes the truth of any...

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Report from the Interior: Looking out at America through the eyes of dementia

Posted by on Jan 21, 2021 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Report from the Interior: Looking out at America through the eyes of dementia

Report from the Interior: Looking out at America through the eyes of dementia

My friend, Ann, suffers from dementia. This is the way I prefer to say it, rather than she has dementia. Having something implies an ownership of and intimacy with, a kind of never-ending entanglement that can but won’t be relinquished. It implies choice. If she has dementia, can’t she let go her grasp and unhave it? If she suffers from it, that’s her response to what she’s been given. These are some of the subtleties that form around cognitive impairment: mincing words, deflecting the truth, becoming familiar with split-second grief. There...

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The Open Door of the Night Shift; Belongness, and the art of being home

Posted by on Dec 10, 2020 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on The Open Door of the Night Shift; Belongness, and the art of being home

The Open Door of the Night Shift; Belongness, and the art of being home

Like many of us in our fair city, I came here from somewhere else. Or as we say in New England, I’m from away. I’m not actually from New England, though it wasn’t until recently I learned New York City was not part of New England. I don’t honestly know what it’s part of. New Yorkers don’t worry about things like that. Friends are initially astonished when they discover I grew up in the Big Apple. To them, I suppose, New Yorkers aren’t suited to the wilds of Arizona, or anywhere they can’t ride the subway or order a real New York bagel. Not to...

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The Shoes of a Citizen; Creating connections in a divisive time

Posted by on Oct 29, 2020 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on The Shoes of a Citizen; Creating connections in a divisive time

The Shoes of a Citizen; Creating connections in a divisive time

I first met Carmen twenty years ago when she lived on the corner of Third and Rose in a purple mobile home. We squeezed in at the kitchen table to study English while her three young kids came and went, hungry or cranky, needing this and that. I was a lousy English teacher, but despite my shortcomings, time did the work. We met at her kitchen table for ten years, and in that time the table changed, the purple mobile home gave way to a house on Patterson Street, the kids grew up and had their own kids. Then, after dutifully studying the...

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In the Interest of Otherness; Living left in a right-handed world

Posted by on Sep 17, 2020 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on In the Interest of Otherness; Living left in a right-handed world

In the Interest of Otherness; Living left in a right-handed world

Consider the southpaw. She lives at first base, tends toward artistic genius, is only ten percent of the population but has occupied the White House six times in the last twelve presidencies. She is scorned, reviled, regarded with the utmost suspicion. In the Romance languages, she shares a Latin root with the word “sinister.” I’d like to shed some light on this complicated and misunderstood creature. Why has history treated her so poorly when her gifts are so great? The investigation of otherness is worthy of many tomes, none of which I’ve...

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Into the Crucible; confessions of a summer starlet

Posted by on Aug 6, 2020 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Into the Crucible; confessions of a summer starlet

Into the Crucible; confessions of a summer starlet

When I was a chubby six-year-old, I had a starring role in a little-known horror film called Blood and Guts. It was written, directed and filmed by a man whose friends and co-workers never suspected his Hitchcockian tendencies. He even had a walk-on role in the movie, á la Hitchcock, in which he played the part of a buxom nanny. This man was my father. We lived in New York City at the time, but the filming took place at my grandmother’s house in New Jersey where we spent every summer. A great big chunk of New Jersey was its own horror film in...

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The Eyes Have It; portraits of a pandemic

Posted by on Jul 16, 2020 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on The Eyes Have It; portraits of a pandemic

The Eyes Have It; portraits of a pandemic

Look at these faces. One of them could be yours. Look at the eyes. What do the eyes tell you that the mouth does not? Eyes are the epicenter of truth while the mouth pledges honesty to no one. Cover the eyes, as most masks do, and leave the mouth free to equivocate. Or cover the mouth with a band of bright color, an American flag, flowers, flames or dinosaurs, and let the eyes do the talking. (continued below) So many of our masks are homemade and beautiful, meant to draw attention to themselves. They own their place on the face, and invite a...

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Tom Brown’s beautiful boxes; Trust, tear gas, and the evolution of everything

Posted by on Jun 4, 2020 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Tom Brown’s beautiful boxes; Trust, tear gas, and the evolution of everything

Tom Brown’s beautiful boxes; Trust, tear gas, and the evolution of everything

Story is how I move through unsettled times. Times when words like curfew, protest, tear gas, riot, fire, looting, violence, rage and justice take their place beside plague, pandemic, lockdown, quarantine, testing and n95. I write this on the last day of May, knowing that by the time these words come to you, four days hence, the world may have shifted significantly. The speed at which 2020 has thrown us out of complacency is remarkable. And yes, many saw it coming. And yes, many welcome its arrival. And yes, there will be naysayers; many will...

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Voices of an epidemic; Art in a time of trouble

Posted by on Apr 9, 2020 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Voices of an epidemic; Art in a time of trouble

Voices of an epidemic; Art in a time of trouble

If we were to take our cue from the denizens of New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, we would be making our way through this rubble of loss, grief, anger and uncertainty by creating art. The photographs of Mapplethorpe, called by some pornographic, though they portrayed the truthful flesh of the most vulnerable; the memoirs of Doty, Johnson and Monette; the fiction of Hollinghurst, Cunningham and countless others—these were the faithful documents and documentarians of the AIDS epidemic in this country, known to...

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The imperfect loaf; Perils and pleasures of the baking life

Posted by on Mar 12, 2020 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on The imperfect loaf; Perils and pleasures of the baking life

The imperfect loaf; Perils and pleasures of the baking life

I’m a darn good bread baker, but my early works could have passed for geologic specimens. Not soft sandstones or limestones either. These were metamorphics, loaves of the Grand Canyon’s Precambrian, nourishment that could break your teeth. The problem was I didn’t believe in the delicate properties of yeast, or its shelf life—or recipes, for that matter. I read somewhere that way back when, the Egyptians made bread in large wet batches, using shovels to mix the dough. I imagined trenches of bubbly, yeasty goo, and armies of men in abbreviated...

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Henry’s quill; Sunyata and the lessons of history 

Posted by on Feb 6, 2020 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Henry’s quill; Sunyata and the lessons of history 

Henry’s quill; Sunyata and the lessons of history 

It turns out Henry VIII was not a very nice guy. Living in the dark ages of human history that preceded Tweeting, his version of the short and nasty was to chop off your head. Or eviscerate you. Or burn you at the stake. He is remembered most of all as an inveterate ladies’ man, but scratch the surface and you find a narcissist, an irascible whiner, a boy who inherited his wealth and power and never grew up—a surprising list of character traits for someone who changed the course of history with a few strokes of his quill. If you encountered...

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Bring on the moon; A beginner’s guide to the marvelous

Posted by on Jan 2, 2020 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Bring on the moon; A beginner’s guide to the marvelous

Bring on the moon; A beginner’s guide to the marvelous

Imagine my fourth-grade classroom. A shelf of math books and stacks of Weekly Readers. The smell of cedar shavings and nose-wrinkling disinfectant. Pale green walls covered with maps of Marco Polo’s travels along the Silk Road. Two high windows looking out across the East River at the foreign kingdom of Queens. A dark December day outside but inside, on Miss Allison’s desk, the Sun is shining. The Sun, a 40-watt light bulb mounted on a wooden platform, shines on a pink rubber ball, which casts its shadow on a ping pong ball, all of it...

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Radical acts of ironing; Tillie Olsen and the relevance of ordinary things

Posted by on Nov 28, 2019 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Radical acts of ironing; Tillie Olsen and the relevance of ordinary things

Radical acts of ironing; Tillie Olsen and the relevance of ordinary things

Years ago, Tillie Olsen published a slim volume of short stories called Tell Me A Riddle. In one of her best-known stories, “I Stand Here Ironing,” she paints a picture of the regrets and realities of a sometimes single, working class mother of the 1950s. At the risk of conflating narrator and author, I’ll venture that this modest record of the life of a mother/housewife/hash slinger/agitator is Olsen’s own story, and for that reason it’s a beacon for those of us who create thousands of excuses not to write. It’s both a beckoning finger and...

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P among the Vikings; Ruminations on neighborhood, inequity and good fortune

Posted by on Oct 24, 2019 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on P among the Vikings; Ruminations on neighborhood, inequity and good fortune

P among the Vikings; Ruminations on neighborhood, inequity and good fortune

My friend—I’ll call her P—came here from a warmer continent and has no winter clothes. When I first met her a week before school began, she had no place to live, no one here previously known to her and no work. She had no bed, no dresser, no towels, sheets, blankets or pillows. We shared a pot of tea and a sandwich that day in my kitchen while she told me of her dreams to first become a lawyer, then the president of her small African country. Our earliest adventure together was to find her a desk. With a desk, she said, she could study, and...

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Here’s looking at you, Dolores; The troubling allure of Elsewhere

Posted by on Sep 19, 2019 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Here’s looking at you, Dolores; The troubling allure of Elsewhere

Here’s looking at you, Dolores; The troubling allure of Elsewhere

I don’t know if you remember Flagstaff in the late ‘70s. I was a newcomer here, living out in the wilderness of Doney Park. I shared a bungalow with an attorney who worked in town, and in the field next door lived two horses, one white, one gray. I was quite the romantic and named the white one Pure Thought, a name I also bestowed on my white truck. We all named our vehicles back then and many of us still do, possibly in the absence of children. In every season but deep winter—and our winters were memorably deep—I slept outside on the ground...

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Teaching the page to sing; Confessions of an unnatural musician

Posted by on Aug 15, 2019 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Teaching the page to sing; Confessions of an unnatural musician

Teaching the page to sing; Confessions of an unnatural musician

The year I played the cello was the same year I voted for Nixon, and if I had to say which one was the greater act of conviction I’m afraid I’d have to go with Nixon. Tricky Dick had not yet earned his name because in that particular election he did not become the president of the United States. The Senator from Massachusetts did. John F. Kennedy. I was only 7 years old, a third-grader who knew as little about politics as she did about music. We had a classroom election (heads down on the desk, arms raised for our preferred candidate) and I...

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From foxtrot to the Frug; Celebrating difference in America

Posted by on Jul 11, 2019 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on From foxtrot to the Frug; Celebrating difference in America

From foxtrot to the Frug; Celebrating difference in America

Mr. Barclay’s Dancing School met every Wednesday afternoon in the ballroom of the Pierre Hotel in New York City. There, under the gaudy chandeliers and watchful eyes of our instructors, we learned the rituals designed to secure us future husbands, children and happiness. At the same time, across the Pacific, the war in Vietnam was heating up, and on our home shores a violent struggle for equal rights, a hand-to-hand combat in certain cities of the South and North, was wreaking necessary havoc on the social fabric of our country. “Kick up...

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Glory Days of the Grocery Guild; A shelf-stocker’s story

Posted by on Jun 6, 2019 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Glory Days of the Grocery Guild; A shelf-stocker’s story

Glory Days of the Grocery Guild; A shelf-stocker’s story

The Pine Tree Market sits between the newsstand and a Lilly Pulitzer dress shop on Main Street, Northeast Harbor. Its green awning offers shade from the weak sun and shelter from the soft persistent rains that wrap the Maine islands from June through August. Fog settles thickly in the harbor below the town, sometimes for weeks. The fancy yachts come in, pick up a mooring and send their crew up the street to buy more liquor and the niceties that yachting people are fond of: goose pâté, hearts of palm, expensive soft cheeses. The Pine Tree is...

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The holy unseen; Fishing for my father

Posted by on May 2, 2019 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on The holy unseen; Fishing for my father

The holy unseen; Fishing for my father

The poet Jane Hirshfield writes, “A world—or book—that is felt to contain the hidden is inexhaustible to the imagination.” Poetry is the subject at hand, but she might as well be talking about fishing. Or about my father when she writes, “Hiddenness is the ballast in the ship’s keel, the great underwater portion of a life that steadies the rest.” I took up fishing in order to get to know my father. We used to stand in frigid Vermont rivers fly fishing for trout. The sun wasn’t up yet and breakfast was hours away, but there we stood, catching...

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Language at the crossroads; Melting borders one conversation at a time

Posted by on Mar 21, 2019 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Language at the crossroads; Melting borders one conversation at a time

Language at the crossroads; Melting borders one conversation at a time

Every other Wednesday, at the unlikely venue of Bigfoot BBQ, the Italian language students meet for conversation. The air is abuzz with questions and answers: “Dov’è la cucina?” “Non lo so.” “Che cosa hai mangiato?” “Non lo so.” For those who have never set foot in Italy, as well as those whose visits number in the dozens, the exercise is the same: Learn the language of a country in order to bring curiosity and courteous conversation to a place where you are a guest. This is how we extend ourselves in friendship to others. This is how we melt...

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Life on the loose; Cultivating the art of unfinishing

Posted by on Feb 14, 2019 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Life on the loose; Cultivating the art of unfinishing

Life on the loose; Cultivating the art of unfinishing

Last fall, in the spirit of the Medici family and a handful of Renaissance popes, we built an art shed, a pretty little 13 by 13 building with an open nature and north light. The idea was to draw itinerant artists, artists without studios, to the back yard by creating a kind of diurnal flophouse. Not being a painter or sculptor myself, I imagined men and women and people of unknown gender flapping about the yard in feather boas and fishnet stockings, smoking cigarettes and sampling leaves of kale from the nearby vegetable garden. Why I felt...

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Antidote to demons; Taking the water cure

Posted by on Jan 10, 2019 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Antidote to demons; Taking the water cure

Antidote to demons; Taking the water cure

On days just like this there’s a frozen quality to everything I do or say or write, as if the north wind brings with it the curse of contraction. I know others feel differently. Winter is a quiet time, internal, full of family and firelight, warm drinks, good books. They see the stars reflected in the snow. I see an icy plain that sparkles with the bonfires of demons. I lived for a few years in the extreme winters of Iowa in a house that shuddered at every suggestion of wind. The front door often blew open in the middle of the night, sending...

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A history of desire; For Tony Hoagland

Posted by on Dec 6, 2018 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on A history of desire; For Tony Hoagland

A history of desire; For Tony Hoagland

Every December, in the hallway outside the kitchen, my mother tacked up a large piece of construction paper divided into five columns. This was the Christmas list, and on it we five kids were invited to write our wants, our desires. From age 8 to 14 the only things that appeared in my column were two words: rowing machine. Some years it looked like this: ROWING MACHINE, all caps and magic marker thick. I never asked for pajamas that matched my sister’s. I never wanted stationary that smelled like powder. Socks were useful but hardly gift...

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Freedom knocking; Conversations with citizens of our town

Posted by on Nov 1, 2018 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Freedom knocking; Conversations with citizens of our town

Freedom knocking; Conversations with citizens of our town

  John Kennedy was killed on a Friday. The following Monday, our 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Taliaferro, wrote the words “What freedom means to me” on the board. We spent the class period writing our thoughts on this hard-to-grapple-with topic while she put her head down on her desk and wept. I don’t remember what my thoughts were. I do remember that Mrs. Taliaferro cried silently but with a noticeable shudder of her shoulders. I don’t know if freedom meant much of anything to me on that day. It was an unsettling time that split two decades,...

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Call me Hereafter; Who are we if we’re not ourselves?

Posted by on Sep 27, 2018 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Call me Hereafter; Who are we if we’re not ourselves?

Call me Hereafter; Who are we if we’re not ourselves?

Dear Ms Dyssegaard, My agent, Malaga Baldi, has informed me that you are interested in my novel and its author. I am forty-eight years old, a published writer working under the pseudonym Hereafter Brown. I have never worked under a pseudonym before but the publishing climate of 2001 is different than when I began to write. As the emphasis now is on new names and first novels, in the course of writing Crossing Bully Creek it occurred to me that I might do the book a favor by becoming an author without a past. To my surprise, there are...

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Elegy for an old house; Measuring the weight of memories

Posted by on Jul 26, 2018 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Elegy for an old house; Measuring the weight of memories

Elegy for an old house; Measuring the weight of memories

The house has good bones. The morning light falls on walls and sills and floorboards, and on the old kitchen stove. Here is the kitchen table where I used to write. There’s the painted chair my friend Malaga rescued from the corner of Broadway and 92nd Street. For 200 years the house has occupied this overgrown hollow. This used to be my home on Cape Cod and now I’ve come back to empty it so it can become home to someone else. There’s a presence here that doesn’t change. Over two centuries the human spirit has seeped into the pores of the...

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Update from a pear-shaped planet; The story of the trees

Posted by on Jul 19, 2018 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Update from a pear-shaped planet; The story of the trees

Update from a pear-shaped planet; The story of the trees

There was a forest between my grandmother’s house and the cliffs that rose from the sea. Spruce and balsam in equal share, white pine, red pine and a collection of towering hardwoods—single masts of maple and oak sailing along in an ocean of evergreens. For my purposes I needed the firs, the balsam. I’d take myself to the place where they were dominant and seat myself comfortably on the ground and strip their needles into a paper bag. When the bag was full and my thoughts settled, I’d walk back to the house. All summer on this island off the...

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The time of Templeton; Recollections of a glorious past

Posted by on Jun 21, 2018 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on The time of Templeton; Recollections of a glorious past

The time of Templeton; Recollections of a glorious past

In the late 1950s, while American families blew up in size and the seeds of the turbulent ‘60s sprouted and began to grow, my parents went through what I call their Mini-Mammalian Period, a microcosmic span of time reminiscent of the mid-Jurassic. It was characterized by an unbridled proliferation of undersized pets, beginning with the patriarch Templeton. Templeton was, in my father’s words, “popular with the ladies, the best mouse we ever had.” He was named, of course, for the grouchy barn rat in E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, a caustic yet...

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The underbelly of the moon; This photographer’s journey

Posted by on May 24, 2018 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on The underbelly of the moon; This photographer’s journey

The underbelly of the moon; This photographer’s journey

The first camera I owned was a pinhole camera. I made it myself at summer camp in New Jersey. It was 1963, the year of a July solar eclipse, and the good people of Camp Red Ram came up with a plan to keep us from looking directly at the sun. We’d spent many days making keychain lanyards and plaster casts of raccoon prints. We learned how to sew our own pup tents from material donated by our mothers. But now, with a small cardboard box and a piece of white paper, we’d make a contraption to watch the eclipse. Simple. Glorious. The sun and moon...

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An unmended house; What has happened to manners in America?

Posted by on Apr 26, 2018 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on An unmended house; What has happened to manners in America?

An unmended house; What has happened to manners in America?

With a well-intended but somewhat unorthodox show of manners, I once picked up a roadkilled pheasant to bring to a friend who invited me to dinner. The bird was still warm. It had a broken wing but no visible trauma to the meaty body. It had clearly been hit by a passing vehicle only moments before. I was headed for the hills, the Knobs of Kentucky, on a narrow midwestern road that carried farm vehicles and fast-moving pickups. I knew from childhood that a guest arrives with a gift for the host and preferably something to add to the meal. I...

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Reading Edith; Of gods, mortals and monsters

Posted by on Mar 29, 2018 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Reading Edith; Of gods, mortals and monsters

Reading Edith; Of gods, mortals and monsters

As I entered the bosque of adolescence, I was lucky. I had my particular bible. It was a thin book with brown and brittle pages that had not held up well to use and age. On the cover was Perseus, winged sandals on his feet, a thick sword in his right hand and in his left the head of Medusa, her scalp dripping with snakes. The book was called, simply, Mythology, by Edith Hamilton, and in its pages I found the gods, heroes and monsters who accompanied me through one of the darkest periods of my life. At first they seemed dubious chaperones,...

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Begin with an empty bowl; A brief history of contentment

Posted by on Mar 1, 2018 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on Begin with an empty bowl; A brief history of contentment

Begin with an empty bowl; A brief history of contentment

About 2,500 years ago a man was seen walking the byways of India, a bowl in his hands. He was bald-headed and simply clad. His clothing covered him but did not speak of preference or fashion. He was variously barefoot or shod, depending on who he had met in his peregrinations and whether or not they themselves needed shoes. If the need was there, they received his sandals. The only sense of permanence about him resided in his bowl. It was an old wooden bowl, thin and shiny with use. He would give it up someday when the winds were right and...

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The pleasure of living near poets; Making mortality’s acquaintance in a town by the sea

Posted by on Feb 1, 2018 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on The pleasure of living near poets; Making mortality’s acquaintance in a town by the sea

The pleasure of living near poets; Making mortality’s acquaintance in a town by the sea

For many years I lived in a very small town at the tip of Cape Cod, Mass. Cape Cod is shaped like a Turkish slipper or an elf’s shoe, and where the slipper finishes its curl, or where a bell might hang from an elf’s shoe, is a town called Provincetown. It’s a town of artists and writers, poets and actors, gay men and women, teachers and plumbers and bakers and builders, recovering alcoholics and Portuguese fishermen. It’s a town of kids and grandparents and of teenagers excited about the prom. It’s a regular town where freedom is an...

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How the light gets in; For Leonard Cohen 

Posted by on Jan 3, 2018 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on How the light gets in; For Leonard Cohen 

How the light gets in; For Leonard Cohen 

On this day, one year ago, I was on my way to spend the winter at a Zen Buddhist monastery in California. I have done this for many years. It is a recurring three months of my life that I spend in relative silence and contemplation, and although it is difficult and different and I have never tried to describe it as “an experience,” there is a great beauty to it that compels me to speak of it now. There is hardship as well. Not much sleep. Or food. And it is often not very peaceful. People tend to believe monastic life, especially Buddhist...

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In praise of imperfection; Young poets on fire

Posted by on Dec 7, 2017 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on In praise of imperfection; Young poets on fire

In praise of imperfection; Young poets on fire

When I was 11 or 12, I developed rituals around perfection in order to enshrine it. A certain chaos ruled my house—five kids, two parents, several dogs, cats, rodents, even a skunk and a raccoon at one point. My siblings were born loud and messy, and I was not. I was born tidy and reflective. I developed ways of preserving a comfortable space around me by following patterns—always go out the same door you came in (our apartment had an abundance of doors), always step across a threshold with the left foot first and always put the right arm...

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The war in which we lived; A childhood in uncertain times

Posted by on Nov 9, 2017 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on The war in which we lived; A childhood in uncertain times

The war in which we lived; A childhood in uncertain times

In New York City where I grew up, we were all veterans of the Cold War. Even the youngest kids, before they could read, knew what the words Fallout Shelter looked like. And the sirens that ushered us off the streets to practice taking cover, we knew what they meant. We couldn’t articulate the end of the world, or the end of our world, the end of us, so instead we fought with each other over little things—who would get to pour the milk or sit in the coveted backward-facing seat of the Rambler—in order to demonstrate our present aliveness. At...

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The teaching gun; Through empathy, we are successful hunters

Posted by on Oct 12, 2017 in Column, Margaret Erhart | Comments Off on The teaching gun; Through empathy, we are successful hunters

The teaching gun; Through empathy, we are successful hunters

This is what you should know about me: I own a gun. It’s a honey-colored 20-gauge shotgun. The metal barrel smells like cold fire, and the gun has a heft to it that I’ve never grown into. It was a gift to me from my mother when I turned 18. The stock was too long for me then because I was expected to lengthen out. Whenever I shot my gun I’d have to do a little extra motion, an out and up motion, which gave my victims a little extra time to live. That was fine by me—I didn’t enjoy their deaths. I was neither a good nor a bad shot, just an...

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