fromthemouthofmoi

Snapshots In Transit A Bus I am on a bus going up First Avenue in New York City. I'm reading a book. I can hear, without looking around, that someone is sniffling up what sound like a lot of snot. I continue to read and the sniffling becomes regular, and begins to sound as though buckets might be needed. This goes on for about ten minutes. I look around to see who is generating such a factory of mucous when I notice that other riders have already spotted the culprit. It is a young man, late 20's, in a white T-shirt and khaki pants. His nose is a full blown scarlet coloured gin blossom. He looks as if he has had a cold since birth. His chest is concave and he is a healthy shade of paste. Just the way he looks causes those nearby to erupt in titters. The tittering, I have to assume, embarrasses him, and I imagine he interprets the laughter as a suggestion from strangers that he blow his nose rather than sniffle. So out he pulls a handkerchief with the dimensions of a twin-siz...

Dear Daddy, Yesterday I found myself lonely for the first time in my life. I suddenly felt alone with a swelling need inside to talk to someone. Not just anyone but someone good and I blurted out aloud: Let me call dad! and just as suddenly I knew I couldn't.  You would have been the perfect one to have called. I can hear your voice now answering the call: Hi baby! And off we'd go for a two hour jaw wag. But you aren't here any longer and I don't have that luxury anymore. And for me, it was a luxury. So I called John. I was hesitant to call him because I have not often experienced him to be deep or sympathetic in the ways that matter to me. To the chronically ill he is the type to say: Get well soon. But call him I did and I found an old friend feeling just as I do as he has just recently lost the last of his parents; his mother. And for two hours I talked and he talked and I learned that he too felt the same pangs and fears of being single and alone and having a de...

I was wee when The Hudson still froze. We, my siblings and I, were bundled brown skin trudging across to The Bronx. Here, in Inwood, my family is not noticed; we are just a few amongst many. Anyone attempting difference is quickly reminded of the commonality of poverty; odds are we are wearing a neighbour's hand-me-downs. I've known Anne forever; I have no sense that there might have been a time when we have not been confidantes.  Green Gables was a dilapidated run down farm house in the middle of the woods when I was wee. Freda and I held hands and fancied ourselves kindred spirits as we traipsed through those woods wondering aloud if indeed we were walking the same steps as Anne and Diana once had. Freda made me kindred when she saw that I too had curly hair; she became kindred when I learned that she was a she in the midst of all boys; a configuration of family not unlike my own. Forty years later we still hold hands when we meet at airports or during a stroll ...