What Sam Has Taught Me
This essay was written while I was very ill, years ago. It came from the heart and a fevered mind, and was perfect for this gorgeous anthology by Laura Lee Cascada honoring her pooch with stories of courageous animals. Sam staggers around zombie-like, legs stiff, toes dragging and scraping on the tile floor. His depleted…
THE FAMILY PORTRAIT, an excerpt
As Michael and I plan our trip to Munich to hear Sieglinde’s story, we take the afternoon to research Lebensborn and decide if there was any validity to “the Nazi baby-making program.”
WORC
When I was fifteen, I walked up to the Whataburger on Seminole Boulevard at the edge of our lower middle class neighborhood in Seminole, Florida and applied for a carhop position. My family had moved into a rental house a few months earlier and I needed a job. My stepfather Ted had recently retired after…
A Daughter’s Journey
Often in the afternoons my father will open a cabinet, and with his gnarled index finger trail the spines of binders filled with catalogued DVDs until he finds one he wants to share with me that day.
Apple Strudel
The January before her death in 2013, my mother Susi came to Florida to visit me. She was living in my half-sister Jackie’s Colorado home and wanted to get out of the cold and snow for a few weeks. During her visit, we both worked hard to be kind to one another. COPD and emphysema limited her activity; a trip to the grocery store sent her to bed for the afternoon. So we dallied over lunches, settled under the oak trees in the backyard and looked out over the lake.
The Stranger
Here is a photo of us. I am sitting in her lap; our heads are close together. We are both smiling. No, I am not smiling; I am grinning from ear to ear, holding a black Fury horse with wheels on its feet and a Joey doll on its back. A gift from this woman who says she is my mother. It is Christmas Eve, my fifth one.
Sleepless in Iceland
My brain registers an insistent ringing as I groan and roll to the wall in defense. The room is dark as night within light-blocking drapes. I can’t seem to remember where I am. Then… it’s my phone that’s ringing and we’re in a pristine Icelandic guesthouse, the Sulur.
Fifteen Thousand Miles
The Taiko drum starts. Thump thump thump. The chanting begins, a breakneck liturgy in an insistent monotone. The timpani accentuates. Clang clang clang.
Writing the Truth
The email from my father began: It is with a heavy heart that I write this… I quickly scanned the German words. My knees buckled as my world plummeted to a depth that had me gasping for air. I understood immediately I had overstepped my writing boundaries.
Maxhutte Lost
“Hello, can you help me please,” I implore in my bad German as I skid up to a suited gentleman at a bus stop. He appears startled, and backs further onto the sidewalk. I’m on my Aunt Sieglinde’s garden bike, a sturdy three-speed with no athletic grace and a wire basket on its handlebars.
Chronometry
We walk, my age-deaf dogs and I. The street light throws my shadow ahead of us. It moves lithely along, stretched slim. In the dark, I can be young and pretty again instead of old and …handsome. My softness is gone now, like my dogs’ hearing …
Finding Walter
We stand outside Building 5 of the towering apartment complex, my German cousin Michael and I, shifting from foot to foot, gawping. At the black and once-white bricks in need of washing. At the door that’s locked.
The Elvis Bathhouse by Maddie Lock
I’m immersed in a deep wooden tub touted to be over 100 years old. Staring down at me with come-hither smoldering eyes and his signature sexy sneer, is Elvis Presley. I too, stare down at my naked body cradled in cloudy brine water and fight a desire to cover myself with the minuscule white square of washcloth I’m gripping…
A Home of My Own
My German cousin, Thomas stares at me, mouth opening and closing silently as he organizes English words in his head, “You are quite unusual. I think you live comfortably with two feet firmly hovering over two continents,” he finally ventures…
The Practice of Writing (and Writing, and Writing)
Three years ago I fell in love with Rebecca Solnit. It was at the start of my re-decision to become a writer. A bibliophile with a BA in English and high hopes to make my mark as a writer, I had allowed myself, many years ago…
The Lusty Bavarian Rooster
KookooKOOroo! KookooKOOroo! KOOKOOKOOROO!
I wander from the kitchen through the open doors to the front landing. The insistent crowing comes again and now I see the proud cockerel as he struts into view inside the makeshift coop on the old town wall…
Chasing the ’Writing High’
Every day that I don’t write is a wasted one. There’s writing and there’s everything else. This creates a spiritual conflict.
Let me explain. I am a student of Buddhism now for four years. I call myself a student because I have yet to step over any definitive line that allows me to call myself…
