At 13, I feel like I’m losing her. It rips my heart in two. We are too similar. And there are too many hormones flying around. I can’t back down because I’m the parent. She can’t back down because she’s my daughter – and she’s caught in the grips of a revolution inside her own heart. So I lay down the law and walk away. Eyes burning holes in my back. I think about my own family, and how they…
I believe that birds make pacts with our dogs when they build their nests in our yard. The dogs keep the cats away, and in return, the birds alert the dogs to the encroaching postman every day. And when the fledglings leave their nests and tumble to the ground, the dogs look the other way. *** Jim Mitchem
We only get one first kiss. Mine was inadvertent. Sort of. It was seventh grade. The object of my affection was a black-haired, golden-skinned beauty named Stacie Shrine. She was a petit girl with a smile like a Close Up toothpaste commercial. We’d been friends since sixth grade when we both entered middle school. Everyone knew we liked each other, but we never took it anywhere. We were twelve. We were ok with being ‘just friends.’ With end-of-year tests out of…
Oh hello Mr. Barred Owl on the low hanging bough just outside my window.
Fresh on the heels of H&R Block’s “Get Your Billion Back, America” campaign, now we have the Yahoo/Quicken Loans “Billion Dollar Bracket” campaign. Unlike the sleight of hand employed by H&R Block, this concept is even eviler. The H&R campaign just twists big numbers around in your head in the hopes you’ll choose them to do your taxes, with Yahoo you must surrender your personal data. So it goes like this – if you pick a perfect NCAA bracket for…
The stories keep piling up and I have nowhere to put them except in little digital envelopes to be saved for a time when I can immerse myself in them and set them free. This is why I freak out about ‘the machine.’ It’s as though the machine is designed to keep me apart from the thing that my heart tells me to do. It keeps me focused on being responsible. And of course the irony is that my life…
