James Earl Jones – says to the young lion king, “Remember who you are.”. It’s expensive, definitely not something in my family’s budget. Now you’re invited into the circle. That evening I wore a long flowered skirt and delighted in my husband’s considerable skill at dancing. She took Amy and me to Fire Island one summer, This time, he’d lived in a nearby car through autumn, then through a blizzard. The garages were below us and the black asphalt driveway radiated back the heat of the day, turning my room into an oven. Earth! Then I could chart the fight, room by room, up and down. You? his innocence: that disarming smile, white jail garb Hooray for me! “You know.” She looked sideways at me, accusingly. Odd, he muses, how the crystal-blue eyes of his smiling, two-year-old grandson remind him of a little old lady with a milky-blue eye and a black eye patch an ocean away. He had a lopsided smile and a small purple scar above his right eye. God willing, I hope to stay fit and work until I am in my nineties … or until I drop. Of course, an impossibly tight panty girdle helped sculpt that waistline. I pointed to a doily, like the ones my Lithuanian-born grandmother made when I was a child. Men-stew-raton? The birds shifted above us, forming a canopy over our car, escorting us down the two-lane road. Doves fly close enough to touch, yet scold “We don’t do justice in this court,” Timbers’s tiny round bald head grumbled. Never. from the water at the base of the rocks, I count along. I pulled off I-94 East onto Lyndale Avenue in Minneapolis, blocks from my house. Years later, she’d say, “Nine days! Senator Barbara Boxer’s California district has two experienced, motivated women candidates vying to replace her, Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez and California Attorney General Kamala Harris. I began training as an English as a Second Language instructor. I wondered if he knew how much I loved him, how desolate I felt. There is one in the hallway to greet me when I come in, another in the room where I write. On our second stop, a restaurant owner invited us to dinner. “Of course,” I responded. My father sits at the wrought-iron patio table, sumi-e brush in hand. I’m proud of the new citizens of Martinez who believe Black lives do matter and are willing to join in the fight against racism. But then they demanded time to shoot, pointing out that that’s how you score the points. “excuse me, is there a doctor or nurse around who could take my blood pressure and pronounce me unfit for this activity?”. But who could blame them for putting before and after photographs of Emmett Till next to your bed, just out of reach, replacing them each time your daughter (who visits once every month or two) or some white administrator takes them away? The date of death was not. Get in the car and drive. Everyone stood then clapped for us – maybe for God, or Handel. He sees families struggling to make money and pay back loans at really high interest. Sukey and the Mermaid Robert D. San Souci. My own daughter, in chemotherapy just nine months earlier, was well and radiant and to be married in nine days. I set four goals for the race: don’t hurt myself; don’t look stupid; finish; and finish in two and a half hours. Once I thought Jennifer was gonna ask Miss Smiley for her autograph. Versed in the etiquette of the sport, I even muffled my enthusiasm when a red-shafted flicker landed on the ball washer while my husband was teeing off. I could get run over by a garbage truck. His mother and father were the usual upward bound couple living in our suburban town. Well, almost on her own. Each death leaves a chasm where friendship and love and shared adventures used to be. He worked hard, and never made a lot, but he had a special perk, It sounds like these books are based on animations of the same name and maybe those give more details. Down to earth. There were failed marketing campaigns in 2017 and 2018 when it had $7.4m hopes. The United States was conceived in protests that began because American colonists were denied the right to vote by their British overlords. Now the twins divide the week between two nurseries. “Don’t waste your time,” she says bitterly. but it satisfied a need to work by myself Jo, who was a traveler, as I hoped to be as soon as allowed. And even if they were, I could still tandem-skydive. Only three made it to what may have been 1943: Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed; Chinese were allotted an annual immigration quota of 105 and permitted to become citizens. But it was so satisfying to play out my old dilemma in someone else’s life. Let him suffer. I hesitate. She folded and placed the doily in a small plastic bag. A week later, I noticed a fat, brown-fuzzy bear on the nightstand. So I remind myself and all of my followers that we have to get up and hit the streets once more – indeed, over and over until we win. The gaping wound, the rent in the national fabric, was far too deep to miss. We drew arrows. But the best part about writing is I can tee off any time, any place, about anything. that once stood just over there, now long gone. See only other person for miles around. “Repurposing,” my neighbor Gale calls it. She didn’t understand the forms; her pants were too tight; she was supposed to go to a different building instead of the main building; and finally, she had left the phone number of the person she was meeting at home and by then it was 90 minutes after her appointment. I stop and watch the leaves turn orange, yellow, green – a promise of better times to come in this sad world of ours. I placed my hand on the creature and held it down. : An Arabic Counting Tale by MacDonald, Tales Told in Tents: Stories from Central Asia by Clayton. Read about the Anthropocene Age, love some others, One is an olive-green corduroy jumper that I wear on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays with blouses of different colors and matching belts. Do you always pick up women here?”. No harm done. OK, I said. “Your mother thought it was due to her charm.”. It is the summer of 1936 and I am spending it in a rundown old hotel in the Catskills where my mother works as a cook and my sister is the receptionist. Nu Dang loves to fly his kite, more than anything else in the world. Sister Romilda (a name she disliked greatly but hadn’t chosen for herself) was up before dawn that raw December morning, listening to the silence. Sunday afternoon and it’s drizzling. A summer sunset. “Mind over matter” was her get-tough strategy. Those of us who are over 60 know the answer. Walk to boat club next door. Halleluia.Halleluia. Soon Chet was depressed and weak from not eating. The service was very nice, a standard memorial service. Recently, I took another shot at creating something wonderful. But at that point, Beejay, in bulldozing mode, had yanked hard on my arm, causing me nearly to lose my balance. My interns dragged me, kicking and screaming, onto Facebook in 2006, soon after a layoff relieved me of the e-mail address and the office switchboard I’d relied on for 14 years. If I hear the awful truth and yet come back, then the young man, so abused himself, realizes he’s not a monster. “My mother is worth ten plates.” He shakes his sadly, “my father, three: only three.”. They so love your courses.”, She leaned forward, hands clasped as if in prayer. Or would it? I was always getting lost when I lived in California. What we did mourn, however, was the small-mindedness, the judgment, the divisiveness, the anger of those who could not accept you for what you were, the whole of you: a daughter of the Depression, a guidance counselor, a woman who loved another woman. And there is – who knew? She gave me a long, loving hug and handed me a brand new gym bag. while I dropped hot marbles that plashed and crackled The Irish lament I had my eyes closed as I followed my breath in and out. My older daughter lays her prayer wand on the coffee table. She wants us to have “the New England Experience.” At the local school, she insists that I be in a class of kids from Newport, rather than the class of Navy kids. “Would you like me to weigh your melons?” he would ask, regardless of what was inside. The age-old sex roles still find their expression in the clothes we wear: men are not supposed to dress to be desired; women are. I hunched over the paper and ran the pencil through my hair. “And now the only thing to do is say you’re sorry.”. Imagine a dusty room in Hèrè jè* Training Center, Mali, West Africa with girls sitting at a wooden table stringing beads – twenty-four seed bead strands woven into braids or cords, necklaces to sell to you or me, in black or red, green or yellow, blue or white. Although we were rushed, he’d calm me down, carry my books, and distract me with silly jokes. I ran down the hill from my school right away when I got her note saying, “See me. in a seemingly endless world of gray A few months into 1942, she loses all equivocation: “It came to me like a bolt out of the blue! Then came the darkness, a lesion to the brain so swift and so merciless we hardly had time to understand that it planned to take him like a pirate and bury him by the sea. Not too bad, though the thighs need work. Whatever it is. Books. 1888 : court card (gb) b. I know where I am in Chicago because I always know where the lake is – even when I can’t see it.”, “I love Chicago,” Ron said. I look into your eyes as we meet, you and me, {In 1996 we sold our house in Cleveland just before Thanksgiving and moved to California in December. On ice and snow. In solidarity with her fellow congresswomen, she, too, wore white – He got really mad and began yelling. It was not until the first Sunday dinner that summer that I finally claimed my own power. My old clothes won’t look so bad. Yasmin and her sister work every day in a brick yard where they hammer bricks into small bits to be used to make cement. Suddenly, the raft is pushed forward. I graduated in the top ten percent of my class; I was labeled an “over-achiever.”. It’s been more than fifty years, and here we are, still howling about justice and covering our past sins like the paintings on the plywood lining the streets in Minneapolis. I heard you were thinking of retiring.”, She pointed to her briefcase swollen with papers. Information about the graduation ceremony. We celebrate Chanukah, I wanted to tell her, but in truth, that holiday always felt more like a gift-off competition – the Jews leading eight to one. 1816-1847: Irish immigration to the U.S. began. You can stop giving me the silent treatment and doing that thing, that thing with your foot.”, And just like a movie, in which the everyday-ness of a scene presages its opposite to follow, just before the car misses a curve and flies off through the moonlight, he repeats, “Stone sober.”. I mean, I heard Mr. Rufus say that they’re cousins, and that Miss Smiley’s fiancé was killed in Afghanistan, and Mr. Roberts was just trying to be nice to her.”, “It could be true, you know. On gunfight days, when my mother got me ready for bed, she pulled scarves from my polo shirt like a magician performing a magic trick. Any of us who taught in them, or in the colleges their students went to, criticized endlessly the overcrowding, and the lack of books, materials, art classes, and sports teams in New York’s endlessly impoverished public schools. face contorted One is that the ascendancy to the Presidency of a man who is so patently a narcissistic misogynist, who acts as if every woman he comes across, even his own daughter, is nothing but sexual prey, has so disgusted so many people that, unable to deter or punish him, we take out our rage on the others who are like him. 1923: The Supreme Court ruled that East Indians did not qualify for naturalization: not white. “Choose the one nearest the beach.” “No, choose the one with the fenced-in yard for the dog.” Why is there so often a dog who needs a yard? Handel’s Halleluiah is about the end of Jesus’ life, not the beginning, so why has it been sung – and sung and sung – at Christmas instead of at Easter? Enchanted Anklet: A Cinderella Tale form India by Mehta (Cinderella story), Happiest Tree: A Yoga Story by Krishnaswami, Heart of a Tiger by Marsha Diane Arnold, illustrated by Jamichael Henterly. who still spoke to him in his sleep. Each contains an aching question of its own. Too large? We don’t want to watch the inevitable progression of little boys becoming killing machines. She hopes for another chance at a great love. I’d be stuck in the back seat of the Dodge, trying not to throw up. “Mom died this morning,” she said simply, telling me what I already knew. My salary alone would not cover the cost of two sons in University and couture clothing. Somewhere in this poem is another story. The roads kept changing names and winding around in different directions. At my daughter’s sixth birthday party, our house was filled with children and parents from her predominantly Black school. Not even when they execute you.”, “It’s O.K.,” I said. Do you think you’ll still be working? Read on – at your own risk. But when she gets a strong pull on her line, Nina works hand over hand to bring that fish in. the agony of adolescence. Notice all the ashes have already blown out of cup. His hair was dark brown as were his eyes. But if there is one emotion that every woman on this planet shares today it is anger. Poor people, people of color, “I tried to explain to them I am not a doctor and can’t make that judgment,” the pharmacist explained to the woman. I was scared, too. The young man is grateful that one of the villagers he’d met speaks English, since he does not speak Slovak. Sit on the top step of Epidaurus and hear a guide tear paper or drop a pin. He owned, he said, a piece of time. Discrimination is yet again, 100 years after the Chinese Exclusion Act, a motivating principle in U.S. immigration law. As always, he had dismissed my suspicions as the product of my pessimism or paranoia, leaving me to pick up the pieces when denial was no longer an option. Fucking. The director of Main Street Martinez, Justin Gomez, had received permission from the city to paint the mural. This is my time to write a new story, capture a revealing dream, compose a poem. We have made friends – and said goodbye to them – as our lives or theirs took a different direction, as we or they moved from the job, the cause, or the neighborhood that had put us in the same orbit, on the same wavelength, for a time. That way, they’d get the goods on anyone sneaking in with cross-stitch supplies. our nakedness needs no skin, bring me to, where it begins and begins. and threats of punishment for Welles. I worked the suicide hotline because the judge said ‘Two hundred hours’ after my third DUI. But the very act of giving produces paradox and tension. We met on the hotel’s court at six o’clock the next morning. And here is the proof of my ethnic negligence: my one beautiful grandchild beseeching me, When is Santa coming? Mourning a miscarriage is to talk about the dreams for a future that would never be, to remember the due dates of those never to be born. Before I knew it, I was telling them about my husband Dick, our lives together and how he had recently died from glioblastoma. I eat peaches, claret My pink toy broom was just the right height for me to ride on. Married and busy, she was no longer around as we unpacked our things and tried to make sense of the new, barren garden and the quiet evenings, the piano gone with her, silence filling the rooms, our aging faces reflected in the windows. Imagine fingers pushing fishing line through beads the size of sesame – beads that anywhere else, once spilled, would be swept aside, fall into cracks, disappear. Now I wonder if all that stepping WAS the problem. Goodbye. In my memory, the Japanese quince bush was always there, planted by my father before I was born. Except you can’t say that. But UNC found me more funds and a low-rent home in Victory Village. 1933: feridoon (ire) ch. Exclamation points of beauty, Raizel felt a little chilled. Next, did I rage? “So what’s the story with the border?” I asked. OK, I said. We roll slowly onto Queen Elizabeth Highway and then, out of sight of the border guards, pull off to the side of the road. The League decided to contact every male legislator in his home district before the next legislative session. Decide to burn that too. As a little girl, I thought he had special powers. Short Takes: So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, adieu. And it is still glorious. This story begins in 1879 when my great-grandfather, a Swedish cargo sailor on vacation, crossed the border to Norway. Dan died in August of ’02, whisked away by brain cancer in a single summer. blah taste, can’t live up to that dream name. A blush of purple on the smallest inner   petals Main Street, which used to have a Woolworth’s and JCPenney, now has antique shops, restaurants, and three coffee houses for tourists and locals. The University in Adelaide opines that it’s no longer copyrighted in Australia and their screen is most attractive. When George was near to death, she leaned in close so she could feel his breath on her cheek. Good will and good writing are among them, as the wonderful. Craigslist has listings for golf in sporting goods in the St Augustine, FL area. 2005: Asylum provisions tightened, and grounds for deportation increased. With a decaf and a chocolate chip cookie, without cigarette or tan or green flowered skirt, I cross my khaki-jeaned legs and dangle my ergonomic sandal on my rosy painted (right) big toe. As we continued to look at the illustrations, however, patterns began to emerge — patterns that were not evident at first glance. I could see them laughing over secret jokes as Mom’s nimble fingers played Chopin for young ballerinas. I tried to calm down, but then I caught a glimpse of myself in my full-length mirror, my one concession to vanity in my 10’ by 12’ room – my sparkly orange top, my long purple flared Indian skirt, my sequined red shoes, and thought, I look great! Couples, too, in wide ranging hues. “I’m sorry, sir.” She gave my husband a stern look. Nits in her hair and now, I’d have them too. Filled with joy she dreams of being reunited with John. Coalitions of infuriated women mobilized. But it’s also where you guarded your secret. My mother, however, still insists my birth is connected to an important historical event, one that should be taught in schools and colleges to this day. Come around.” He set up a chair against the wall, waved me in, and moved in close. This side of the newborn stream         there’s Jo, who knew children and liked them, so whole a person in herself that she had something left over to give: kindness, warmth. Don’t worry if it breaks, it’s okay. She greeted my words with her silence. I climbed down to the tarmac at JFK airport on August 15, 1969, India’s Independence Day, a girl of 23 who’d never before seen the inside of one airplane, let alone two. As the kisses went from soft and short and tender to longer and deeper and wetter, he leaned back against the counter and closed his arms tighter around me. Now it’ll get worse.”. 1913: desmond (gb) blk. When I was seventeen, I climbed into bed every night with the imprint of my rag rug on my knees.