CROSS-PURPOSES
My third year at Seven Hills School I was promoted to teacher at $5 an hour—and co-taught the five-day preschool, again with Karl. It was a rough start, though. As an aide, I’d heard the teachers around us complain that Karl’s kids were out of control, and I’d...
PRISONER
Around this time I went back into therapy through the county—with Helen, a psychiatric social worker like my mother—seeing her once a week for free. She was a former nun who had left the convent after falling in love with a priest, though they didn't wind up...
LICE-ERONI
This is a scene I imagined for a movie–a spinoff of an actual conversation I had one evening with Arlen and Harry: Speaker 1: Anybody see The Hellstrom Chronicle on TV last night? Speaker 2: That’s the one about insects, isn’t it? Speaker 3: One of those Roach...
ANOMALY
One day in the middle of last week, it snowed. Only the noon before I had herded the kids out onto the deck in front of the school for pick-up and noted, as I sat luxuriating on the steps, how fine and warm the sun shone, as though servicing a summer day. It was the...
HOMOPHOBIC
My evenings with Arlen and Harry were so convivial, partly because her kids were off at college—and I no longer was witness to the disparity in the way she treated them. She often used to say that she’d been her mother’s little princess and her father’s little match...
COMPANIONABLE
Once Jeff and Karen, Arlen’s kids, had left home, I often visited her and Harry in her little cottage with the wild back yard, using the guest room with the wicker bed to spend the night. In A Patchwork Memoir I wrote:
Harry is lounging in an easy chair…