The first thing you hear is screeching tires. Then you turn in the direction you think it’s coming and you hear breaking glass. Then everything spins and spins. The next thing you remember is waking up with tubes in your arm. And a jackhammer in your head. And blurred vision. Then you go to sleep. You eventually open your eyes to find your husband standing next to you. Behind him, your parents. They’re all smiling. They start talking to you, but…
Six months ago I was a sullen soul standing in a swirling, biting, bitter wind. The coats had long been pulled from the attic and were now cluttering our closets. The summer sun a distant memory, my skin already ash. It was December. The winter solstice. Three months to go until spring. Probably a couple more until it was safe to wear shorts. And yet somehow, I smiled. I knew that the darkest days were behind us, and that…
Sitting in a periodontist’s office watching patients arrive, fill out forms, read old magazines, and disappear into the back of the office as staff hurry along shuffling papers and tapping tablets. Everyone is smiling. Patients leave the office with little bags of toothpaste, floss, and a toothbrush – a canon of oral hygiene that they’ll toss into a cluttered drawer in their bathroom at home. Every time a nurse calls a man’s name they look at me like an unmarked square on a…
Yesterday, Florida Senator, and 2016 Republican Presidential hopeful Marco Rubio publicly denounced climate change. “Our climate is always changing,” he said on ABC News’s “This Week.” “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it,” he went on to say, “and I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it, except it will destroy our economy.” Money. It’s always…
I started driving at 16 down in Houston. Learning to drive in Houston is akin to learning to drive on a video game. Lots of traffic. Lots of exit hoppers. You learn how to juke driving in Houston. As a result, I’ve gone my whole life without ever hitting a car, a person, or an animal while driving. And there have been plenty of opportunities. Kids chasing balls. Dogs. Even alligators when we lived in Florida. Here in Charlotte we…
Last night during the second-half of her team’s tough match against a strong school, I approached one of Agatha’s coaches on the sideline – something I had not done at any level in the 8 years of watching her play. Until that point I hadn’t so much as introduced myself to her Middle School coaches and here I was walking up to one of them. During a tight match. Sure, he knew who I was because I’d been present during…
