I had no plans for my second Lunar New Year break in South Korea, content to spend my three-week break from teaching sleeping until five. I never knew if it was five in the morning or five in the afternoon, since the January sky was dark for both. This was in humanity’s pre-smart phone days, […]
Writing
Once Upon a Time There Was a Girl Who
I grew up knowing my father was maybe a Gypsy, the kind that travelled around Ireland with beautiful spotted horses and painted caravan wagons. Or maybe my mother, like Janet of Carterhaugh, met Tam Lin in the forest and battled for him with the Queen of Fairies. The government told me she was 32, he […]
Gray People
For Youth Activities Counselors aboard my cruise ship, seeing consecutive blocks of “WASH” on the schedule could be a nightmare. We’d signed onto ship life because we wanted to goof off with kids all day, maybe revise our own childhoods to include copious amounts of adventure and sunshine. Nobody wanted to get stuck monitoring a […]
like a light
It was hard to remember the first drink, or what age I was. Probably a sip of beer at a family picnic or a quick sneak of Beefeater at Christmas. Whichever it was, it doesn’t matter now. Not that it ever really did. Because there’s been hundreds since and hundreds to come. There’s been enough […]
Civvies
I had a friend who slung his boots over a power line on the road leading out of north Camp Pendleton. He tied the laces together and threw them about 50 times before they caught, and they hung there alongside dozens of other sets of boots, desert boots and jungle boots, boots that had been […]
Meaning of Burning
6th grade. It was like every male in middle school discovered the word “virgin” all at once. It appeared on our tongues overnight, like a rabid ulcer. I was slow to pick up on things back then. Slow to care about what the other fellas were into. My mind was occupied with Weird Al lyrics […]
