A spark bird is first love, the bird that ignites a heightened interest, an out-of-the-blue fascination. I was sparked by the Bewick’s wren, a small bird with a big voice. Not brilliantly hued like a cardinal or bluejay, my starter bird, my first infatuation, is gray-brown with stark white eyebrow stripes and a perky, black-streaked tail. I first singled them… Read more →
One evening about ten years ago, in a suburb of Pittsburgh, my twenty-six-year-old son, Matt, and I walked a few blocks to get pizza. Soft yellow sunlight, on its way past the horizon, slanted through the trees. A light breeze tickled the skin on my sleeveless arms. “I should have a sweater,” I said. “This is nothing,” Matt said. “This… Read more →
She knew that she had to grab the snake right at the back of its head. That way it wouldn’t be able to turn and bite her. She knew it was just a garter snake, though her grandma’s calling it a gardener snake still clung to memory if only because the snake was in her garden, her perennial bed. The… Read more →
Josephine was shoeless in the pasture before sunrise, the ground so cold she warmed her feet in the steam of cow manure, and when she met a man at market, eye-leveling tomatoes, she said, What lovely apples, and he married her, and she learned how to drive, practiced American sentences, birthed a daughter who covered her ears and hid from… Read more →
A gay Orthodox boy in Australia is wearing my grandmother’s diamonds, under his everyday white shirts buttoned to the neck, against his skin like the fringes’ whisper of G-d. He is the fifth of twelve children, the third son and so statistically likely to take too much pleasure in the gabardine funk of the minyan, shoulder to shoulder muttering baritone… Read more →
Eight hours before my grandmother died, the youngish, curly-haired doctor sat at the foot of her bed and told us she didn’t qualify for hospice. When he got up to leave, my grandmother smiled coyly and shot him a few pleasant but nonsensical syllables that mimicked the inflection and rhythm of speech. The hospice doctor patted her leg through the… Read more →
Amber’s mom takes us to the seven o’clock showing of Titanic at The Murderplex. Of course, that’s not the actual name of the cinema, but that’s what everyone calls it. A few years ago some people got shot there during a screening of The Godfather III on Christmas Day. After, it became the first theatre in the country to install… Read more →
Joy is bergamot and lavender, scents on the breeze or in my tea. Peace is the quiet heart of sweet potatoes salted and buttered, comforting and health-giving, a heavenly prism. Love is a garden salad bursting with fruit: strawberries, blueberries, diced apples, banana. God is a marshmallow on a stick: held to the fire but still good for it, and… Read more →
When my brother was 23 and I was 22, I sat talking with him one day in the house in Los Angeles we had grown up in. I was home from college for a visit and he had come up from Orange County where he had just started his first real job as a computer programmer. He had double-majored in… Read more →
Lake Erie was going to have a tantrum and shit all over our weekend plans. We knew this because the news stations had created a special logo with a cartoon snowflake creeping over the shoulder of the year, in safety orange numerals. The logo crept over the corner of the news anchor whose hair could withstand all the tantrums. I… Read more →