On this night, I have to beg permission from the hospital authorities to let you leave so you can join the Seder...I don’t look up to the heavens when I am on t...
He was disheveled and smelled like cooked grease and cigarettes. It was an odor I associated with his being poor and hemmed in. There was so much about our life...
Maybe I should tell her that Daddy drives with his knees while poking triangle holes in beer cans? Or that he once fell out his car door while rounding a corner...
In short order, I went from liar to thief. I took my brother's silver dollar collection. No one spent old silver dollars, so when I tried, the manager of the 7...
As a girl coming-of-age in the late 1980’s, I was told I could go anywhere and be anything I wanted to be, but of course, no one could tell me how to do this, o...
Even though four yards or more of open air separated our being, in those moments, we were one, brothers. I could feel my Sioux and Cherokee heritage run through...
A memoir in the finest sense of the genre! An easy read, packed with astonishing events that flow into one another like water, The View From Breast Pocket Mount...
Sister knew my father longer—and better. Living closer to my father than I, she had spent more time with him. Being more blessed than I, Sister had more than e...
Afterward, at a nearby coffee shop, Pops and I munch on grilled cheese sandwiches and drink café con leche. We talk about the different jobs the workers do, how...
My father called me names, made me cry, and one time even threw my plate of Easter frittata at the wall because he said I was being fresh. But he was the best n...
I try to cool the heat in my cheeks that her sarcastic “wise, rich daughter” comment brings on. Her walker embarrasses me, too – unsightly, attention-seeking, d...
The waiting was unnerving. Alli asked almost daily when Daddy would go to jail. For a second-grader, jail was something imagined from cartoons. We did little to...
I am lazy, fat, asinine, stupid. I still feel his red hot anger, the spit on my face, and the insults flying toward me. The feelings and labels remain, despite ...
It was only a matter of time before one of us was going to break down and scream, beat our fists against the van’s upholstery in disbelief and frustration.
I opened my mouth; my entire body becoming a scream that ripped open the night, a scream so heavy it was mercurial, filling every corner of the room with a blue...
Before my wife and I got married, my mother told me that my father had expressed concern about my future brother in law’s gayness being passed along to our chil...
There were my mother’s stories, and there were my books. Books were imaginary but some books could be true; Betty’s stories were neither true nor not-true, they...
My father and mother are trapped in this country, waiting for many years for permission to immigrate. Every six months he patiently goes alone to the Soviet Vis...
Life with Dad was an endless game. We shot candles out of Mother's silver candelabra on the picnic table. I learned to drive racing the jeep around hay bales in...
My mother pressed her cheek to Leslie’s cold face and cried. She rocked back and forth, holding my sister’s limp body close to hers. And those Congolese women r...
