The Late Arrival

Our five-minute-won’t-be-late-for-school-just-yet window was fast closing while I scrambled around the kitchen trying to remember whatever it was that I’d be sure to forget once we were on the road. Soon, we were on the road. Or at least in the alley on our way to the road when I realized the road was being tarred. Tarred to the right. Road tarred to the left. I couldn’t take the turn I wanted in either direction, so we coasted down one alley and then the next and then the next looking for an open, untarred road. Finally we made it to the thoroughfare and it was all smooth sailing until… …the railroad crossing . More precisely, the railroad crossing being crossed by a train two intersections ahead. I panicked slightly and dimmed the dashboard lights so Georgia couldn’t obsess about the clock ticking down the minutes to her being tardy. Traffic had backed up from the railroad crossing intersection to ours, but I could see far enough ahead to tell that the train had passed thr...

A bird's-eye view of the ocean, a blanket of blues and violet. Could be dawn, it could be sunset. There are no undertows, no threat of menacing aquatic life and tidal waves look like silent ripples in a pond. In the middle of it all is a tiny speck of white -- or maybe yellow. It's Diana Nyad somewhere in the in the sojourn of an over fifty-eight hour swim toward the Florida Keys.   Now zoom in. Further into the journey as she reaches her destination greeted by wading well wishers and you see her emerge from the waters swollen and dazed. This scene isn't as serene as the imagined one. In fact, there's even a trace of ugliness and gritty reality there, but within that scene, we're able to hear Diana reminding us to "Never give up" and that "You're never alone." That's something that can't be heard in the idyllic birds-eye view. Everything's prettier from a distance, don't you think? Doesn't mean that the zoomed-in gr...

You ever read a headline even though you know the news is going to be bad? I did. The headline was “Many Americans Have No Friends Outside Their Race” based on results from an online poll administered in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict. Here’s the Reader’s Digest version: non-white people have a low percentage of close friends who are white, and white people have an even lower percentage of close friends who are non-white. The west coast is a little better in this regard than the rest of the country and the southern part of the country is worse. DUH. I think the knee-jerk reaction to this is for people to mentally shuffle through their racial rolodex and start ticking off friends who don’t look like them. Heck, I did until I remembered that I’m married to a white guy. (he’s my husband so I guess he counts as a friend, right?) But throw race out of the equation entirely, and you end up with a much bigger question: Of the people we consider friends, do we consider any ...

Oh, I’ve done a couple of 5Ks and a mud run or two, but honestly: I don’t like running. What I do like is the feeling of “Wow I really can do this” when I run for a longer distance with each workout, and the sense of accomplishment that comes with finishing a race. By now you’ve heard about the marine who fell back during a race to help a little boy who was struggling to finish running that same 5K. Just imagine it: the finish line tape in sight, sensing that you’re beating last year’s time, pulling ahead of the pack with your running buddies when you hear someone ask “Sir, would you please run with me?” It’s the right thing to do so you do it. And the marine did. The story’s blown up on social media channels and nationwide newscasts, and the marine has received well deserved recognition for doing the right thing. But what about the boy? This kid could’ve asked the marine to carry him --  after all, marines are tough guys. That scene alone: the kid on the marine’s shoul...

Part of me has wanted to shut down all news over the past week and shield my ten-year-old from the coverage, while the other part wanted her to at least have a consciousness about it. Today, she asked about the verdict -- rather, she commented on what her understanding of all this has been. “So…a lot of people are mad because they think Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin because Trayvon is black.” In that moment, I had to boil down, cut through the outrage, demonstrations, talking heads, blaming, claiming and tell her what I believed: “Yeah. That’s true. But here’s what we have to remember: we can’t mind-read or heart-read. Only George knows why he did what he did and…” She interrupted me “…and God. God knows why he did it.” “Exactly.” I was frank with her “…but I just can’t imagine how Trayvon’s mom and dad feel. What a nightmare. I mean, their son is gone – he’s dead, honey. And George’s mom? To know that her son took someone else’s life …” ...and I trailed off thin...

It was the shot heard round the bundt pan : Paula Deen admitted to uttering the n-word...repeatedly. In the past. She issued one pathetic video recant (or so I've heard because it was taken down as quickly as it was posted), then was scheduled to issue another wanna-be mea culpa on The Today Show, but instead settled for a new  Please-I-Got-Butter-In-My-Recipes-Don't-Y'all-Remember-How-Much-Y'all-Love-Butter apology video. None worked and the Food Network summarily dismissed her and her buttery goodness by not renewing her contract. Sorry, Paula. Yes, I said it: Sorry. What hapeend to you is because you reflected your upbringing in the south during the days when people living south of the Mason Dixon Line regularly referred to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression . Trouble is, somehow, someway, you just couldn't keep those words, that history and that slant from bubbling up out of you and into conversation. Truthfully Paula, I'm not worried...

Her head spun around once, then twice and upon the third rotation, she levitated. Her eyes, now radioactive green, met mine and she hissed “I already washed my hands for dinner!” With that, she began to happily chirp away about something funny that happened at school. It was as if the levitating, the hissing had never happened. My daughter -- my sweet, happy-go-lucky baby girl was possessed. By hormones. As frustrating as it is for me, I’m careful not to give her the kookoo-for-cocoa-puffs side-eye, or be dismissive of the venom that might escape her lips because all too often, hormonal blame is the eraser of valid thoughts and feelings. You know the excuses: “Oh, she’s just PMS-ing" or it’s “That Time of the Month” or " She’s Menopausal" or "She’s Perimenopausal.” Wink-wink, nudge-nudge. It's a diagnosis that negates whatever your complaint is no matter how valid. Which is even more frustrating, because nine times out of ten you’re having an out-o...

It was too early to head home on a much-too-rare date night when I espyed the bar a few blocks from our house that I had long been curious about. From the outside, you could tell the seating capacity inside was fifty at most, and the name spelled out in glowing blue and pink neon letters was one I couldn't pronounce. The most I knew was that it was a few blocks from the Serbian orthodox church and the Serbian meeting hall so it must have been Serbian. Didn't matter. It seemed like the kind of place where you walk in a stranger, but quickly make friends with the nieghborhood regulars and the friendly bartender who'd never forget your name or your drink after a first meeting. No frills, cheap drinks and probably a great jukebox with Patsy Cline and the Eagles in rotation. I convinced Jamie as much. We parked and went in. As expected, it was dark and cozy, and I immediately liked the place. Also as expected, it was a Serbian hangout. Handsome, dark swarthy people in soccer...

In the few years under my belt as a hack writer, I’ve read a lot of posts from a lot of other bloggers, hoping to pick up on the things that make a piece great or gripping. This nonprofessional research has turned up one thing: honesty. Honesty, as in Are-you-sure-you-wanna-say-that-out-loud honesty. Yeah. That. The great pieces have always been from writers who speak from their hearts and say things that are ironically funny, sometimes painful, but always glaringly, transparently, and sometimes embarrassingly, true.   Bare. Truth. Transparency. That takes courage akin to walking on a frozen pond during the spring thaw.  Think about it: we’ve all got stories that could make us great writers – even the hacks like me, but it’s all a question of courage: what are we willing to share? Are we willing to bare some uncomfortable things?   In my case, it’s missing my mom. Oh, the coward in me will casually refer to losing her at a young age and wax philosophic a...

The rush of cold air and sticky summer heat created a thick fog as I opened the freezer door. It was someplace in the back. Forgotten and alone, but still usable: the whole chicken I planned on making for supper. At a few months shy of turning twenty, this would be my first attempt making a “mom dinner” for the family since my mom’s death a few months back. She’d buy whole chickens – fryers – because they were cheap. This last lone fryer, a rock hard frozen bird, was one of her last purchases and my inheritance. I threw it in the sink and covered it in tepid water to defrost. Some hours later, as I cut away the now defrosted chicken’s shrink-wrapped plastic shroud and gave it an icy cold kitchen faucet shower, I could feel something shaking around inside the cavity. Instantly, my mind’s eye pictured mom’s hands going inside the thing and pulling out tiny, mushy flesh-colored baggies before cutting up the bird for frying. With chin lifted skyward and mouth corners turned down, I...

I work for a nonprofit. More specifically, I raise money for the nonprofit by writing grants, mailing solicitation letters, making calls and tap dancing and singing, if asked. It’s a challenge, I mean, let’s face it: my nonprofit’s not helping puppies, kittens or another awwww-so-cute-invoking constituency. The people coming to us have alcohol and/or drug problems, or struggle to put food on the table, or are unemployed, or have been abused, or are abusing, or are on public assistance, or fall within any range of broke, struggling and searching for a lifeline. Sometimes one person has all of those issues, but more often than not, they’ve got a combination of a few. Issues like those never thrive in a vacuum. We see and hear a lot of the ugly, seedy side , and it isn’t just the ugly seedy people from the ugly seedy side of town who need help. The well-dressed professional from the burbs is just as likely to ring us up or walk through the door as is the tattered person from the slu...

This is mom at about five years old. It was long before she made the vow that changed her name, before balanced meal moderator duty, before matching five different people's multiple pairs of socks post-laundry, and before preventing four kids from strangling each other daily. Even as an adult, it's still hard for me to imagine her as something other than Mom . Maybe she had those days when it was hard for her to imagine it too. I wonder if that season seemed a distant memory as she was elbow-deep in cloth diapers, or waiting at my brother's hospital bedside while he recovered from one his many surgeries at Children's Hospital, or realizing that every thought, every decision she would ever make would be tied to our best interest. I wonder if she giggled at herself amidst the chaos of four children, absent mindedly signing her maiden name on a permission slip, quarterly grade report or some other piece of paper that we kids always seemed to be pushing...

It’s been raining here for about three hundred years. I’ve turned these days that aren’t even colorful enough to be considered gray upside down and tried looking at them from a grateful perspective. You know... sunny thoughts like “This is God’s way of getting us to appreciate little things like sunlight” or “You can’t have rainbows without the rain” or “April showers bring May flowers.” That worked for about two days. Turning on the nightly news didn’t help either. I can’t exactly remember what the "Up Next" teaser was. It might’ve been something about someone killing someone else and how they did it; or maybe it was about what war might break out next, or it could’ve been about a senior citizen getting scammed, but then again maybe it was just something about politicians being at each other’s throats in between filibusters. I frantically switched the channel in search of something lighter…like the Weather Channel . The weather guy, who was donning a stove pipe hat,...

One-third of a woman's life is spent in menopause. One-third . I heard this on a daytime newshow from a "Ladies' Doctor" who works at one of the nation's most respected hospitals. So it's true. Knowing this, and knowing I'm living in some fraction of the dreaded third, you'd think the last thing I'd have done was purge my closet, otherwise known as the Multi-Decade Crypt of 80's and 90's Beloved Relics. Which is the very thing that makes the one-third statistic problematic. My body won't stop changing. I figure I'm in the first third of menopause, which means I'm in perimenopause. My body's doing weird things. Stuff is shifting. Things are flattening out and increasing and decreasing in unpredictable zones at will. The cullling of the jeans made that apparent: some were the Skinny size and some were the Ah-What-the-Heck-I'm-Just-Expandin g Size. Jeans of Broken Dreams I remember buying the Skinny  sizes quit...

It’s taken nearly a week, but I’ve figured it out: Staycations are overrated . And people who happily tell you that their family wanted to staycation are lying on two counts: They wanted  a staycation. No one wants a staycation, but sometimes you must Staycation. That the time off is staycation in the first place. It’s not staycation, it’s time off , and that’s all it is. If a name must be attached to it, it’d be whatever the snappy pun is for “Of course we’d like to leave this crappy weather and spend our time off school and work someplace tropical, but we just can’t aford it." So there it is. My family is on whatever that snappy little pun is, but we’ll call it Staycation because I haven’t come up with a snappy little pun yet. The truth is that we would’ve loved to escape to Jamaica or Disneyland or anyplace without snow, cold or the threat thereof, but it just wasn’t in the cards for us. Or more specifically: the bank. Or our wallets.     I put a good fac...

You’ve got six words to tell me about yourself. Six . Only six. Could you do it? Even though I know myself relatively well, I’m not sure I could because I have a penchant for flowery language and on occasion: bloviating. Six words sure doesn’t leave a lot of space for bloviating. But it leaves just enough space for. The Truth. Now let’s spin the question a little: You’ve got six words to relate your thoughts on race . Six words. No flowers, no bloviating. Just. The Truth. It is possible; and, in fact thousands of people are posting their six word thoughts on race via author and NPR contributor Michele Norris’ Race Card Project . The online project invites everyday people to submit their thoughts, their stories on race. These thoughts and stories are intended to act as a catalyst that stimulates conversations about race, a particularly touchy subject and sometimes sorespot in America. Race makes us shift uneasily in our seats. We dance around it. Don’t talk it about i...

Oh, everyone can sing. That was the encouragement my musician mother gave many a reluctant choir member who claimed “I just can’t sing solos” throughout the years. She nudged me along with the same admonishment when I joined the high school choir and offered the same protest. Mom knew I was keenly aware that my voice was nowhere near the caliber of her classically trained soprano and that of my sister’s pipes with an insane range of tenor to alto to coloratura. Oh, I could carry a tune in a bucket, but it was clear that Carnegie Hall wouldn’t call for a command performance anytime soon. My voice was different from theirs. Not bad. Just different . Fortunately for her musical charges -- and for me -- one of the many wise things about my mom was that she could see the beauty in The Different and open your eyes to see it too. So...her reluctant singers would sing. Including me. Not sounding like her, not sounding like my sister, but sounding like… me. Today,...

What I’m about to say may put me at risk of being drawn and quartered by an angry, torch-wielding mob, but before I go on, a preface: I love women. In fact, I am a woman who comes from a long line of women. My mother was a woman, as was her mother before her, and her mother’s mother’s and as far as we all know, so was her mother’s mother’s mother. However when I found out that March 8 was International Women’s Day , I rolled my eyes and sighed heavily. I was not moved nor was my heart aflutter. I get it. We’re women. We function and think differently than men. We don’t well up at the mere thought of a male dog being neutered, and yes we are aware that our monthly hormonal shifts make no sense to anyone, including us – so don’t expect logic and/or ask for logic during those times. We accept that, with each passing year, our breasts slide downward, yet we sojourn on wearing constricting contraptions to veil gravity’s sag, er…I mean pull…uh, perhaps effect is a better choice o...