Category: friends
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Newcomers
It’s been so mean lately. Oh, I know it’s always been mean. “Off with their heads!”; machetes removing limbs; “We will kill you for dancing”; waterboarding a workaday torture; “Tell us what you heard your father say about our glorious leader”; pogroms; labor camps; piles of bodies. It’s always been mean. The current mean is…
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To Feel the Sun from Both Sides
I met her fifteen years ago, when I was 29, and she was 59. We taught at the same college, and my first semester there was her last. She retired when she turned 60, and although we’d met when we were colleagues, our friendship didn’t really begin until we no longer worked together. Having encountered…
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Starring Matthew Modine and Linda Fiorentino, with a Special Appearance by Madonna
I have a friend of a friend. What? It could happen. I might have a friend, like from Cub Scouts, and this friend might talk to a bartender sometimes, and after about four vodka tonics, my Cubby Scouty friend suddenly has a new shot-pouring, swizzle-sticking “friend” blurrily weaving around there behind the expanse of oak.…
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Arc of Some Skivers
In the fall of 1985, my mom dropped me off near the little town in Minnesota where I would be starting college. Fortunately, my aunt and uncle lived at the spot where she stopped the car, so it wasn’t like I was left trying to hitch a ride to campus or anything. Mom had a…
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Emergence
Four years ago this summer, in 2003, I started to think I might be an adult. I was 36. Sure, I had been married for a few years, I’d been teaching at the college level for more than a decade, I’d been a homeowner several times over, and I had two kids. But up until…
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Time After Time
I’m currently the bologna in a Colorado sandwich. I’m aware makes no sense, so don’t scrutinize it too closely. Cutting through my nonsense, what I’m saying is that I’m currently in Minnesota, having recently come back from a kamikaze weekend in Colorado. And tomorrow, the family and I are taking off for, you guessed it,…