Category Archives: Memoir

Unfold into Blossom

If you’re not sure that opening is for you, every life is better for it. And if you don’t think vulnerability is really your thing, guess again. Grief shuts life down. Locks the doors. Pulls the drapes. Shutters the windows. But at some point, you have to go outside again. And inevitably, in your firstContinue reading “Unfold into Blossom”

Something Like Family

Every year in June, one block south on Midvale Avenue, the parents throw a big birthday bash for their little boy. This year it was a mariachi bouncy castle. Latino children streamed down the street for hours, in twos and threes, black hair bobbed in bowl cuts, their mothers close behind, arms swinging, dressed inContinue reading “Something Like Family”

Just Walk Away

And keep on walking. In the end, it’s easy to say sociopaths don’t really matter. The rest of us go on with our lives. We fall in love and marry and have children. We see our friends through the deaths of loved ones. We plant gardens. Life goes on. It’s comfortable to say that. ButContinue reading “Just Walk Away”

The Look of the Female Sociopath

Forget the Look of Love. This is game time, Cupcake. And the first thing any sociopath will do is size you up. Do you pose, in any way, a threat to their own superiority? Are you not giving them the obeisance that is their due? Or are you just irksomely, annoyingly happy all the timeContinue reading “The Look of the Female Sociopath”

Encounters with the Conscienceless: Learning from Sociopaths

Sure, sociopaths are unpleasant, even evil, people. They don’t abide by a moral code because they lack empathy. They only understand the emotional damage they inflict in an anthropological sort of way–through observation–because they lack emotions themselves. And their manipulations are primarily motivated by a desire for power and superiority. Psychologists recommend steering clear ofContinue reading “Encounters with the Conscienceless: Learning from Sociopaths”

That Sound

My grandfather loved Glenn Miller. As a Mobil service station man, he respected how Miller had worked as a poor musician and composer all through his twenties and early thirties, never getting much of anywhere. “But he was always looking,” Grandpa said, “looking for that sound.” Grandpa understood that a man could be looking forContinue reading “That Sound”

How I Ended It

Like many girls, my first great love was ballet. But the Royal Academy of Dance examinations terrorized us once a year. The first time I stepped into an examination room and faced an examiner shipped in from the Commonwealth, I was ten years old. The square windows in the doors were taped over with paper,Continue reading “How I Ended It”

The Wound That Heals

What is the value of standing witness? Atrocity and inhumanity and evil–is there a moral imperative to record it? Today I picked up a book in the library titled, The Healing Wound by Gitta Sereny. She writes of Nazi Germany and genocide with first-hand experience, but all I could think of was that title: theContinue reading “The Wound That Heals”

A Prayer for a Friend

I met her when I was 19 years old. I’d been recommended for a job at the campus writing center, and she was the first staff member to greet me. It took me a minute to absorb this. Jana has cerebral palsy and relies on a wheelchair to get around. I was blinded by theContinue reading “A Prayer for a Friend”

Leaving the Fold

                                It wasn’t the scientific objections. The glaring fallacies and inconsistencies in the doctrine. For me it was the morality of the thing. The Mormon worldview refuses to face the human condition squarely. Buddha, at least, could admit that “lifeContinue reading “Leaving the Fold”