Letter from Home appears weekly in Flagstaff Live! each Thursday, and is written by a rotating cast of Flagstaff-based writers, including Tony Norris, Shonto Begay, Jean Rukkila, Peter Friederici, Darcy Falk, Laura Kelly, Kate Watters, Margaret Erhart, Allison Gruber, Stacy Murison, and an occasional guest writer. Click the Read More button below any of these posts to read the full version and view any images that the authors have shared.
Both Sides Now
My thoughts kept returning to the letters I’d mailed…to say that my mom was hurt would be an understatement; in fact, she was heartbroken. Crisp autumn sunshine flooded the streets of upper Manhattan that afternoon. City buses and yellow cabs lurched from light to light, horns honked, pedestrians milled along the sidewalks. I stood in front of a big blue U.S. Mail drop-box on the corner of 63rd and Broadway clutching two envelopes, feeling mildly sick, almost dizzy. One was addressed to my father, the other to my mom. It was October of...
read moreNurse Marinate
After a year of borrowed addresses, this Christmas comes with nothing addressed to me. Not even a ghost of Christmas past asking for a wish list. Not to worry, when you are displaced and have to pack up again every few weeks, ownership becomes theoretical. I have one close family member, my son, who I suspect bought my gift at a gas station, and I love him for it. Last winter, fire took the house. It happened as I myself was learning how to leave. It was the first Christmas in years without the old accounting system in play, something like a...
read moreAll I Want
A Barbie. A bike. A Nancy Drew book. As a kid, my Christmas wish list rarely veered from the typical wants of a middle-class American grade schooler. I wanted some shiny stuff to play with, and I wanted to read about the escapades of my favorite teen detective solving yet another soft crime. I am decades away from childhood. Shiny stuff has lost its sway, and the hyper-commercialized holiday blur of the year’s end and the new year’s onset spurs me—and many of us–toward contemplation, moral inventory and an everpresent desire for peace....
read moreDear Future Self
Dear Future Self, First of all, you were supposed to write down all of the things you learned throughout the year, but journaling seemed to go by the way back in January. It would have helped to have had some notes so that I could remind you of everything you experienced. I’m trying to write to you in my post-sweat euphoria from exercise class. That’s one good thing you kept doing this year, even through your hip replacement. Sure, you had some setbacks, but you completed your 80th cycling class today and finally broke the last/last streak in...
read moreThe Peculiarities of Our Time
For a long time everything was colored by the public violence of that death. We saw it: Jackie, her pink suit splattered with blood, crawling across the back of the convertible. We saw it in photographs in the pages of Life magazine, and later on television, and we were children. When Vietnam became the first televised war, the precedent had been set: We were going to see our tragedies unfold in what we now called real-time. I won’t say we were used to it, used to seeing people, young men, killed thousands of miles away, killed right on the...
read moreInterstate Vignettes
I suppose the great majority of Americans in the modern era have grown up in relationship with the interstates. With the exception of those living in extremely urban or extremely rural places, residents of the Lower 48 are seldom truly far from a tie-in to the seemingly endless web of superhighways that ties the country together, with its accompanying membrane of Super 8 motels, super truck stops and tourist traps, and super-sized soda dispensers. Before the World Wide Web, there was the Nationwide Web, approved and funded in the Eisenhower...
read morePlay a Todd Song
May your hope always outweigh your doubt Till this old world finally punches you out… — Todd Snider, “Like a Force of Nature” It’s midnight on Saturday in my little shack, rain tapping on the roof. Just the dog and me and the music of the late Todd Snider. The barefoot bard of East Nashville is gone and I’ll admit it, I’m crying. It feels like I lost a friend. I never met Todd Snider, never even saw him play. But he’s been keeping me company on rainy nights...
read moreRectangle Reasoning
Over the past year, I have lived in several homes. Some were house sits, some were borrowed guest rooms. Each had a different layout, a different style of couch, and a different set of rules about how to care for pots and pans, fancier than I could ever afford. But as the doors revolved, I found myself drawn to rectangles that reassembled my emotional world. For once, straight lines felt more comforting than curves, and rectangles felt oddly restorative. One was on a ranch in the New Mexico desert, a large open window that turned the desert...
read moreThe Edge of Our World
Stephen Eginoire is a small man with abundant hair and a rock climber’s sense of fashion. He seems uncomfortable around the microphone, as if it might turn and devour him. It is Thursday evening at the Museum of Northern Arizona and Stephen is at the podium, leading us down into a world beneath the world, a photographic journey into the caves and aquifers of the Grand Canyon. Far beneath the surface of the Kaibab plateau exists a system of caves carved over millions of years throughout the Redwall limestone. Inside some of these caves runs...
read moreRepresentation without representatives
By the time you read this, it will have been 30 days since the federal government shut down. I’d like to say that by now, something has changed—but this is America, where optimism goes to die in a subcommittee. Despite protests, strongly worded letters from federal employee unions, and a lawsuit from twenty-five states (including Arizona) demanding the continuation of SNAP, I’m feeling confident—perhaps too confident—that nothing will happen again this week. The House of Representatives met for three minutes and two seconds today. In that...
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