The old buildings downtown were memorials of the businesses they used to house, pictures of their former lives in the windows. No stores, no people on the sidewalk or looking out windows. We would turn to head out of town, pass little houses that hadn’t been painted in decades but had, as my husband pointed out, brand new motorcycles on every porch. All the houses had porches, torn screens in storm doors, and rusty bicycles in the yard. Then we’d have to turn, and we’d be back on that main street.

The twilight zone is a real phenomenon after all.

Her fingertips brushed the surface of her eyeball, but didn’t catch the edge of the lends. She blinked, and tried again—left thumb and forefinger prying open her eyelids, right thumb and forefinger trying to catch the edges of the contact and pinch it off. Dark brown iris staring straight at the mirror, witnessing its own assault. Her fingertips were dry. So was her eye. Not a pleasant combination.

The third attempt was successful; a little more pressure, trying not to scratch the sensitive flesh that is the eyeball. She blinked and her tears stung.

Now for the left one.

My nephew guilted me into going on a field trip with him. To a funeral home. Science Club or something like that. I suppose there’s a lot of science wrapped up in death, but I’m not sure that most of it is to be found in a funeral home.

His mother, though, being the kind of person she is, wouldn’t go, and it was her turn to be a chaperone.

I picked out a casket for each member of my family. And an urn.

I made a mental note to discuss preferences (cremation or burial) at the next holiday feast.

Sam didn’t like his sister’s boyfriend Chris much; Chris was a local wrestling star, and on principle, Sam disliked anyone who loved contact sports as much as people like Chris clearly did. Sam preferred not using his body to force people to move in a certain way—or to force them into a position where they couldn’t move at all. Teaching people to do that seemed like it was teaching trouble, the kind he hated to think of his sister getting into.

On brotherly principle, anyhow.

Come to think of it, he didn’t like his sister all that much, either.

Thad watched all the people board while his stepdad read the paper. What would an air marshal look like and where would he sit? Probably toward the back, an aisle seat. In jeans and a jacket, maybe. The slightly pudgy man sitting in front of them stood in the aisle, trying to figure out where to try to stash his laptop case. It was a tight fit under the seat, and as he awkwardly maneuvered it into position, the man was clearly aware that there were people waiting to get to their seats farther back; his face kept getting redder.

Shopping always sounded more fun as an idea than it was as a reality. Every time she went, she always found herself shopping for everyone else—her daughter, her mother, her sister who lived in another country altogether. Sometimes even her neighbor. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy buying herself new things, and it wasn’t that she didn’t like her body (well, okay, when she went against her better judgment and tried on something that was cute on the hanger but that she knew would not work on her…) Even in bookstores, she never managed to shop for only herself.

our favorite way to (tie-)dye eggs:

wrap the eggs in plastic wrap; rubber band the plastic wrap into place. be careful not to make the bands too tight—you’ll crack the shell.

take a (big) needle and poke holes in the plastic wrap—a lot of holes for more color, fewer for littler color. fewer is better if you’re going to use more than one color, in which case you also need to change the plastic



if I have daughters, we’ll dye eggs like this. (sons would just poke each other with the needle and try not to get caught.)

My cat Kelsey was nowhere to be found. We hadn’t seen her since early that afternoon. We crawled on our hands and knees in the bedrooms and searched the closets (‘cause she figured out how to open them a long time ago), if we didn’t thoroughly search the basement and garage, it’s only because there were just too many places she could hide. Besides, those are cold places, and she prefers the carpet in front of the fireplace—but we did all open the doors and call for her. Turns out that she did go looking for a garage adventure.

Kelsey is epileptic. I have to “pill” her twice a day. Those aren’t our favorite moments.

Only one in a hundred cats is epileptic (compared to one in ten dogs), according to our vet. She didn’t always have epilepsy. I think she may have acquired it from chasing her tail in my first apartment’s clawfoot bathtub; I think she liked the sound she made—more clinky than her scratching claws on hardwood floors. But frequently, the tail chasing would result in a porcelain thunk. (Epilepsy is common in those with head injuries, and it doesn’t always show up right away.)

An “outraged” politician agreed to help you by personally writing to another politician whose ear you need. You find out the politician gave the task to one of his assistants two weeks after he said he’d take care of it personally. When you talk to the assistant, he has no clue what the situation is. Then he takes another week to write the letter, and when you get a copy of the letter in the mail, the situation is warped and understated and there are four typos in the first paragraph.

How seriously do you think your problem was taken?

Cori, my wife’s matron of honor, had collected business cards from her own wedding planning process. Cori is the sort of person who agonizes over every decision and probably interviewed two dozen photographers for her own wedding. She probably arranged to meet them at the local coffeeshop—she’s never anywhere else on Saturday afternoons—and went through all of their portfolios twice.

Wendy looked through the cards (alphabetically organized in plastic sleeves in a binder) and stopped halfway through. “Her,” she said, pointing to the card with soles of feet across the top—a family of feet, big and little.

First, she reread the fourth, fifth, and sixth Harry Potters. (She had made the mistake of not rereading the fifth before the sixth one came out, and so she pretty much spent all of book six remembering what had happened in book five, and therefore not absorbing anything that had happened in book six.) Then she reread her all time favorite book, Deerskin; she reread that book every year and a half or so. Then it was a fantasy series from her first year of nursing—nine books in that one (four too many, she knew, but reread them anyway).

The kids were playing a cross between tag and something with finger-guns. The monstrosity of a play-gym that the PTA had raised money for was the perfect place for this sort of game. Of course, it also made it hard to keep track of your kids. There was constant counting—three of mine, four of them (them=the kids I’m watching but who, thank God, I don’t have to take home with me at the end of the day); three of mine, two of them—ah, there are the other two. Back to three and four. None kidnapped or lost yet…

Lena never knew she could be so tired. Enviously, she watched her husband—whose shoulders were not drooping and whose eyes had no circles under them—sign for their purchases at the baby stuff store. Her little girl, about 24 months old with straight strawberry blond hair, sat in the kid seat of the cart, pretending to read a brochure she grabbed from the counter. The baby on the way gave her a kick as if to say, “Hey, pay attention to me now!” and she wondered why she’d gotten pregnant again so quickly. Had it seriously been their intent?

My sister is pregnant. Twins. I’m going to be an uncle. My wife is ecstatic, and is now planning out when we should have our first kid. She hopes twins run in my family—she’s always wanted twins. I keep telling her that they don’t, but she hasn’t been listening. My sister, the hormonal one, thinks my wife is nuts—she’s scared to death to be facing two at once. Imagine them at thirteen, all mouthy and everything, she says, and that’s if I can get them both past diaper rash, teething—[groans] imagine the crying—potty training, walking, kindergarten…

Her fingernail polish was chipped at the edges. He wondered what that said about her. Maybe she was just exceptionally busy and didn’t take time for things like painting her nails. Maybe she’d run out of nail polish remover. Maybe her niece had painted them and she just didn’t want to remove it yet.

He had no doubt about what the color meant, though. Soft pink. (Was there such a thing a hard pink?) A girl who wore pastels was gentle, feminine—a girl out of a 50’s sitcom. She wanted a family.

What if she didn’t usually wear pink?

He had been a grade school janitor, years ago. When he retired, he had a good pension and money saved to travel. He tended to save it, just in case. (His parents had been Depression survivors.) But his wife had died when she was 65, heart attack. He didn’t feel like traveling after that.

Mornings, he went to McDonalds for coffee, which he drank while he scratched lottery tickets and read the paper. On weekends, he met his nephew coffee and Scrabble, which they played on the deluxe board, the one with the plastic ridges to hold pieces in place.

When I was a kid, family friends came to stay a weekend with us. Their daughter (who we liked, so I suppose that makes her our friend, too) brought this case of professional colored pencils. They were smooth, matte black, with an inch of lacquered color at the unsharpened end to show what color you were grabbing. Coloring books were a waste of precious lead, so we dragged out all the drawing paper we could find, and pretended to be artists. I put that colored pencil set on my Christmas list for seven years.

I never did learn to draw.

The group eyed each other, despite their pleasant-enough chit-chat. Most of them knew each other, at least by sight. The one woman who most of them had in common—that is, they knew her enough to carry on a conversation with her in the grocery store cereal aisle—suggested that everyone find a seat. This week they were meeting in Sue’s basement, so they had a variety of chairs and sofas to choose from. They each had a notepad with them, and a couple of pens. As they focused on her, everyone felt the tension and knew: something was beginning.

I keep thinking that writing book reviews would be easy. I love to read. I love to share my opinions, at least in the matter of literary endeavors. I’m a decent writer. I should be able to write book reviews that people want to read. And yet somehow they all come out trite if I liked the book—I find myself initially using the same adjectives (clever, unique, frank, entertaining, fun). But I’ve written a number of what I think are fair-to-good reviews.

If I didn’t like the book, though, I won’t mince words. (Don’t bother. Not worth the effort.)

It was a little blue, faceted button. Naomi thought it was a jewel, but Wendy showed her the little shank on the back, with a bit of blue string still haphazardly attached.

“Hey,” said Wendy, rolling the button in her four-year-old fingers, “this would fit in my nose.”

And to prove it, Wendy held the button to her nostril and said, “See?” But then she breathed in, and the button lodged. They tried to get it out, but Naomi’s mom called her to go home before long. Wendy caught her arm as she left the room.

“Don’t tell my mom.”

The woman who is the protagonist of “Johnny Angel,” is really a young Eleanor Rigby. I don’t approve of sitting by the door and waiting for Mr. Right, but I don’t seem to be able to deal with the Mr. Wrongs, so instead of going to get drinks with my friends—and I only have a few—or even chatting up guys in line at the grocery store or video rental place, I cook myself wonderful meals and sit on the front porch. I think Mr. Right should arrive on your doorstep. Maybe some relative of the stork brings him.

He’d lost his wedding ring. Strangest thing. He’d taken it off while he worked in his shop—he’d put it right in the dish on the window sill, the clay dish she had picked up for him at a garage sale the summer they’d moved into this house with the garage where he could have a shop.

The dish was ugly, painted yellow with red and green shapes that were roughly square or triangular. Probably a school art project. He’d complained that she’d picked out something so ugly; she’d replied that it was for his shop, so who really cared?

He wasn’t a particularly nice man, her husband. In fact, he was mostly an ass. A me-me-me man, who pretended he was an it’s-all-for-us man. He managed a bank, made good money, but Mary Alice frequently thought that he would have been somewhat happier (if happier was the word for it) as a stockbroker on Wall Street.

Their son had decided to teach high school, computer skills. Mary Alice had supported this, but her husband had gone through the roof. You had to teach forever—and spend a ton on furthering your education—before you made any real money teaching.

Eragon is not a great book. It's not even a good book. I like the fantasy genre, and I like teen and YA books, but I could not get past the tedious dialogue and convenient contrivances of the plot. It got to the point where I dreaded even facing another page. It isn’t even original—just a composite of other fantasy series.

And I’m mad that so many well regarded review sources showered praise upon this book. For shame. Those people should know the difference between good writing, and teenage writing that may someday be morphed into something much better.

I found a million dollars under my pillow when I woke up this morning. I haven’t lost any teeth lately, so I’m sure it wasn’t the tooth fairy. (Since I’m unaware of any lost tooth shortages, I’m pretty sure no tooth would be worth that much, anyway.)

I actually don’t find it all that troubling that I don’t know where the money came from. I’ve determined to invest it in the things I like most—flora, literary endeavors, happiness and love. Those last two things don’t necessarily go together, as I find I have to remind people again and again.

Helplessness feels like drowning in the air
Whatever you do, nothing changes the situation
Your arms can’t stretch far enough
Your legs can’t kick hard or fast enough

It would be like a late night bondage game—
Collars, ropes, blindfolds—
If there were anything even remotely enjoyable about it
If you could somehow not feel so desperate
Just to be able to breathe normally again

Without having to wait for permission to do so
Outside your invisible box
Which may be nearly the world wide
Except that one corner

Of course, the only corner that’s important
Your goal
Your love

The man looks miserable—his mouth is closed, his eyes are watching the girls as they talk. He holds his hat limply at his side. He came dressed to impress in his finest jacket. I wonder what he said to create such a scene.

His sweetheart stands twenty paces away, her face equally distraught, though she clearly feels she is the wronged party. She won’t look at him.

Her sister, the chaperone of this picnic, is urging her to forgive him. We know this because the girls are still in the scene, and because the scene’s title is “The Peacemaker.”

“They’re having an affair,” he said, leaning close to whisper in my ear. His lips brushed my earlobe. If we weren’t in a restaurant—and a very nice one, at that—I would turn my head and brush my lips with his, and he would…

“Who is?” I ask, taking a sip of my wine. It’s red, not too dry. I feel the glow of it all the way down to my…

“Next to us. See, they’re both wearing rings… but she’s not his wife. That’s not her husband.”

“What makes you so sure?”

Charlie had a dream that Sandra, his wife of 37 years, asked for a divorce. In the back of his mind, he kept telling himself that it was just a dream, that Sandra was happy and wouldn’t dream of divorcing him. After all, they had three children—twin boys and a girl—who were nearly out of the house, and now their lives were becoming their own again. Kind of like before they had kids. Except better, because they’d been through so much more together.

He woke up, and rolled over to fold her against him. “Don’t ever leave me.”