Retrospect proves that social media sites need not become cesspools of trolling and rancor.
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Retrospect proves that social media sites need not become cesspools of trolling and rancor.
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The demons barge into my brain at three a.m., check for messages, make coffee.
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Oh, there’s also a swan (a brave tenor) who sings of roasting in agony on a spit.
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What it's like when your college interview is conducted by an FBI agent.
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You turned down backstage passes, our friends asked? Are you CRAZY?
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The last person to know me from moment one was reaching the end. What did she want to hear from me? What did I want to say to her?
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Virtual Seder like it's 1999.
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Our hearts all skipped a beat, so you can imagine the child’s terror, her scream piercing the waiting area.
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Spring break on Aruba? Oh yeah! There was only one problem.
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But little hands lifted the top of the garbage pail,
and discovered the resting place of the gumdrop tree.
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We did not relish listening to praise and platitudes about a woman who was, to put it charitably, hard to get along with.
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The flyer—featuring a jolly Santa and offering floor models, repossessions, and a choice of linings—was in spectacularly bad taste.
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I walk out in a daze, music ringing in my ears, the girls in their party dresses still twirling across my eyes.
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Neither rain, snow, sleet, nor gloom of night was going to deter us from our planned movie date.
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How can I convey the childish joy of wading around the tubs as the grapes squished and squirted between our toes?
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Each time I respond to a post, Facebook uses it to categorize and phenotype me, to slice and dice my likes and comments and sell them to the highest bidder.
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No one is self-conscious about the nudity, and from our attitude and bearing you would think we were all decked out in our Sunday best, headed for church.
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I could give you the recipe, but you'll have to sign a release form.
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We were as close as family without the drama or angst.
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“When will we ever get another chance to see a sea monster?” Patti urged, sealing the deal.
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The thrilling tale of the Dread Pirate Roberts and Rodents Of Unusual Size and the Cliffs of Insanity and the Zoo of Death.
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Hey kids, let's put on a convention!
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Patti and I simultaneously glanced up a side street, spotted a pizzeria, and nodded knowingly at each other.
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Nixon's address would go down at 3:00 in the morning, London time. But this was history and we were not going to miss it.
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The stakes were sky high: the corner single.
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“What does CQ stand for?” I asked. “It doesn’t stand for anything,” he answered. “It means ‘Seek you.‘”
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The case of wine slid across the carpet and the bottles fell out. With a crash, one broke.
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We all thought equality was a great idea, but it was not easy to translate into the day-to-day work of being married.
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I wore no wig, no makeup, no heels—just the dress, set off by the full beard I wore at the time.
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I devised an ingenious way to break the arrangement to my mom. Or so I thought.
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We watched the events of 9/11 with a kind of detached horror, since we didn’t personally know any of the victims. Or did we?
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It’s not just the outcome I’m unhappy with. It's also undemocratic.
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The sauce was a perfect blend of mayonnaise, summer vacation, Tom Terrific, rainbows, and ambrosia.
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We wore multiple hats because we had to, but we also thought we could do anything and no one was there to tell us we couldn’t.
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Why my friends had to drag me to the rifle range, and why I kept coming back.
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The drab, cavernous room reeked of sweat and hormones. Then the DJ mounted the steps to the stage.
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"It's really a blast," I wrote in my travel diary. That was high praise in 1966.
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Upon reaching the age of three, what does a little boy expect from his dad?
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In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, all of them ending with a tumble into the surf.
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He took a bite and chewed it, slowly and deliberately, as the rest of us talked. Then another.
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We know your passion for trucks, and so / We come to the park bearing trucks.
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We asked just two questions. The first was whether they supported or opposed the ERA. The second ...
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There were men dancing with men, women with women. Aaron had brought us to a gay club—our first.
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My father employed the same grilling method as every other suburban Michigan father in the ‘50s: incineration.
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You could relax there, she thinks. You could get away from it all.
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As an added bonus, Jiminy Cricket taught me how to spell "encyclopedia."
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It is an auspicious day for a cremation There will be no tears today Tears would drag your spirit back to earth Your pallbearers wear earrings and black shirts Sporting logos of Harley-Davidson, Heavy Metal; On your wreath, a banner Advertises the Sheraton Nusa Dua The cremation tower, sunny white and yellow, Adorned with your…
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Remember how, in her 70s, she walked four extra blocks in a snowstorm to save a few pennies on toilet paper?
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Superman was cool. With superpowers and all. And nobody ever asked who I was supposed to be.
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Under no circumstances, Kodaly told our conductor, will you rehearse anything but my Te Deum between now and the performance.
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Half of what’s in our fridge today, I hadn’t even heard of in 1965!
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Rob says, okay John, you get to lead the way back, and I smile and giggle and I say are you sure, and he says sure.
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“What are you going to do?” they asked. “You’re an academic!"
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Turn it on, wind it up, blow it out, GTO. Yeah, that was me.
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We could get credit for the golden boulder—if we could somehow transport it to the assayer’s office without getting robbed.
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We spotted three girls across the street. When they saw us they giggled, whispered among themselves, and waved shyly.
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Don't miss the show-stopper, "Molasses to Rum to Slaves," about Northern complicity in the slave trade. Seriously.
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We wrote our own vows, read from Sandburg, Saint-Exupéry, and Gibran, and sang songs by Jacques Brel and John Lennon.
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“You understand, we can’t mention this again,” I told him. I felt like a criminal conspirator.
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I had hair; my grandfather didn't. So it was only fair to let him wear the mortarboard.
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The words rolled lyrically off my lips. Each sentence had a rhythm, a cadence.
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I loved how the keys plunked and the typebars clattered, the ping of the bell and the thwack of the carriage return.
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Michigan seems like a dream to me now.
—Simon & Garfunkel, "America"
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UNiversity, BUtterfield, KLondike, WOodward, YUkon—those old phone numbers were so easy to remember.
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I told them I was only eight, but I promised the announcers that when I was older I would drink Stroh’s beer and use Speedway 79 gasoline.
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Then came a series of questions about rock music, meant, I'm sure, to be my downfall.
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Was the song meant to instill a false sense of pride in his students, or a fever dream of a school where he’d really like to teach?
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Would you destroy a piano to make a music video? Keith Emerson would.
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They were all cute, a mix of golden retriever and German shepherd, but she was the cutest, a fluffy round ball of fur.
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Then someone said, "You guys get up there." Bud and I looked at each other. Why the hell not?
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The words roll off my tongue despite years of disuse, their rhythm like music, like chant; like Ginsberg, like Dylan.
Read More
The wait seemed interminable, but the later our birthday was called, the less chance we had of being drafted.
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Even by tenth grade, Amy had developed, like Scarlett, the ability to dangle young men from her fingertips. I dangled gladly.
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Craig gained additional notoriety in 1990 when he appeared in newspaper ads modeling Calvin Klein briefs—and nothing else.
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Only now does the sheer phallic audacity of that picture make me chuckle.
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This guy Heinlein could really tell a story.
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No drugs. No alcohol, even if we were over 21. (We weren't.) No female visitors after 11 on weekdays or midnight on weekends.
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You know how roosters crow in the morning to greet the dawn? That’s a myth, we learned when we moved in.
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It is his scent that comes back to me most strongly: a mixture of leather, Barbasol shaving cream, and cigars.
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My grandfather loved horses and gambling more than he loved my grandmother, so he spent a lot of time at the racetrack.
Read More
“What’s this?” asked Wendy. “Chocolate cream pie,” I answered helpfully. “It’s like soup,” said Jean.
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We cram sweaty into a booth, raising scarcely an eyebrow in rented tuxedos and spaghetti-strap gowns.
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Joe's hat sported not only a Nixon-Agnew campaign button but, beside it, a Goldwater button from four years earlier.
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Story Wranglers: An Update
Prompted By Retrospect Retrospective
/ Stories
Retrospect proves that social media sites need not become cesspools of trolling and rancor.
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Night Demons
Prompted By Sleepy Time
/ Stories
The demons barge into my brain at three a.m., check for messages, make coffee.
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How Carmina Burana Changed Our Lives
Prompted By One Song That Moves Me
/ Stories
Oh, there’s also a swan (a brave tenor) who sings of roasting in agony on a spit.
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The Interrogation
Prompted By Interviews
/ Stories
What it's like when your college interview is conducted by an FBI agent.
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Mystery Guest
Prompted By Fame
/ Stories
You turned down backstage passes, our friends asked? Are you CRAZY?
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The Four Things I Told My Mother in Hospice
Prompted By Forgiveness
/ Stories
The last person to know me from moment one was reaching the end. What did she want to hear from me? What did I want to say to her?
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Gustav and the Rugrats
Prompted By Spring Celebrations
/ Stories
Virtual Seder like it's 1999.
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Phantom of the Opera
Prompted By Do You Believe in Magic?
/ Stories
Our hearts all skipped a beat, so you can imagine the child’s terror, her scream piercing the waiting area.
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The lies we told each other—and ourselves.
Missing Out on Aruba
Prompted By Spring Break
/ Stories
Spring break on Aruba? Oh yeah! There was only one problem.
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The Gumdrop Tree, by Myron Unger
Prompted By New Beginnings
/ Stories
But little hands lifted the top of the garbage pail,
and discovered the resting place of the gumdrop tree.
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Grace
Prompted By Grandparents & Grandchildren
/ Stories
Written in response to How We Like Our Eggs
We did not relish listening to praise and platitudes about a woman who was, to put it charitably, hard to get along with.
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Klearance Sale
Prompted By Comic Relief
/ Stories
The flyer—featuring a jolly Santa and offering floor models, repossessions, and a choice of linings—was in spectacularly bad taste.
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Aftermath
Prompted By Parties
/ Stories
I walk out in a daze, music ringing in my ears, the girls in their party dresses still twirling across my eyes.
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Tornado Warning
Prompted By Dating
/ Stories
Neither rain, snow, sleet, nor gloom of night was going to deter us from our planned movie date.
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In Vino Communitas
Prompted By The Garden
/ Stories
How can I convey the childish joy of wading around the tubs as the grapes squished and squirted between our toes?
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Black Magic
Prompted By The Social Network
/ Stories
Each time I respond to a post, Facebook uses it to categorize and phenotype me, to slice and dice my likes and comments and sell them to the highest bidder.
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The Baths at Esalen
Prompted By Nudity
/ Stories
No one is self-conscious about the nudity, and from our attitude and bearing you would think we were all decked out in our Sunday best, headed for church.
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Cream Cheese Crack Cake
Prompted By Recipes
/ Stories
I could give you the recipe, but you'll have to sign a release form.
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Family of Friends
Prompted By Vintage Photos
/ Stories
We were as close as family without the drama or angst.
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Le Monstre de la Mer
Prompted By The Twilight Zone
/ Stories
“When will we ever get another chance to see a sea monster?” Patti urged, sealing the deal.
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True Love and High Adventure
Prompted By What We Read
/ Stories
The thrilling tale of the Dread Pirate Roberts and Rodents Of Unusual Size and the Cliffs of Insanity and the Zoo of Death.
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Rocky on the Second Ballot
Prompted By Student Activism
/ Stories
Hey kids, let's put on a convention!
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Just Pizza
Prompted By Restaurants
/ Stories
Patti and I simultaneously glanced up a side street, spotted a pizzeria, and nodded knowingly at each other.
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Expats in London: Summer of ’74
Prompted By Watergate
/ Stories
Nixon's address would go down at 3:00 in the morning, London time. But this was history and we were not going to miss it.
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Roommate Poker
Prompted By Roommates
/ Stories
The stakes were sky high: the corner single.
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Yokohama Item Nancy
Prompted By Technology
/ Stories
“What does CQ stand for?” I asked. “It doesn’t stand for anything,” he answered. “It means ‘Seek you.‘”
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The Car That Smelled Like California
Prompted By My First Car
/ Stories
The case of wine slid across the carpet and the bottles fell out. With a crash, one broke.
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Androgyny
Prompted By Gender Roles
/ Stories
We all thought equality was a great idea, but it was not easy to translate into the day-to-day work of being married.
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Trading Places
Prompted By Trick or Treat?
/ Stories
I wore no wig, no makeup, no heels—just the dress, set off by the full beard I wore at the time.
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Cohabitation
Prompted By What My Mother Told Me
/ Stories
I devised an ingenious way to break the arrangement to my mom. Or so I thought.
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Bounceback
Prompted By 9/11 Twenty Years Later
/ Stories
We watched the events of 9/11 with a kind of detached horror, since we didn’t personally know any of the victims. Or did we?
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The Electoral College, Redux
Prompted By Quick Take: How Is This Still a Thing?
/ Stories
Written in response to Article II, Section 1
It’s not just the outcome I’m unhappy with. It's also undemocratic.
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Secret Sauce
Prompted By Drive-Ins
/ Stories
Written in response to Forbidden Fruit
The sauce was a perfect blend of mayonnaise, summer vacation, Tom Terrific, rainbows, and ambrosia.
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It Doesn’t Have a Name Yet
Prompted By Let's Put On a Show
/ Stories
We wore multiple hats because we had to, but we also thought we could do anything and no one was there to tell us we couldn’t.
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Sharpshooter
Prompted By Guns Then and Now
/ Stories
Why my friends had to drag me to the rifle range, and why I kept coming back.
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The Pixies Three
Prompted By Concerts
/ Stories
The drab, cavernous room reeked of sweat and hormones. Then the DJ mounted the steps to the stage.
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Catching the Waves
Prompted By Aunts & Uncles
/ Stories
"It's really a blast," I wrote in my travel diary. That was high praise in 1966.
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Upon Reaching the Age of Three, by Myron Unger
Prompted By Father's Day
/ Stories
Upon reaching the age of three, what does a little boy expect from his dad?
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Surfin’ Safari
Prompted By Too Young To Be This Old
/ Stories
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, all of them ending with a tumble into the surf.
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Appetite
Prompted By Altered States
/ Stories
He took a bite and chewed it, slowly and deliberately, as the rest of us talked. Then another.
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Jackson’s Third Birthday
Prompted By Toys & Games
/ Stories
We know your passion for trucks, and so / We come to the park bearing trucks.
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Stop the ERA
Prompted By Women's Lib
/ Stories
We asked just two questions. The first was whether they supported or opposed the ERA. The second ...
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Disco Inferno
Prompted By Dance Crazes
/ Stories
There were men dancing with men, women with women. Aaron had brought us to a gay club—our first.
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Close your eyes and think of baseball.
Mr. Meat Guy
Prompted By Mealtime
/ Stories
My father employed the same grilling method as every other suburban Michigan father in the ‘50s: incineration.
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Moloka’i Dream
Prompted By Be Careful What You Wish For
/ Stories
You could relax there, she thinks. You could get away from it all.
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The Mouse and Me
Prompted By Children's TV Shows
/ Stories
As an added bonus, Jiminy Cricket taught me how to spell "encyclopedia."
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Life and Death in Bali
Prompted By The Great Beyond
/ Stories
It is an auspicious day for a cremation There will be no tears today Tears would drag your spirit back to earth Your pallbearers wear earrings and black shirts Sporting logos of Harley-Davidson, Heavy Metal; On your wreath, a banner Advertises the Sheraton Nusa Dua The cremation tower, sunny white and yellow, Adorned with your…
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Grace
Prompted By The Great Beyond
/ Stories
Remember how, in her 70s, she walked four extra blocks in a snowstorm to save a few pennies on toilet paper?
Read More
Cowboys and Kings
Prompted By Halloween
/ Stories
Superman was cool. With superpowers and all. And nobody ever asked who I was supposed to be.
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Harmony
Prompted By In the Band
/ Stories
Under no circumstances, Kodaly told our conductor, will you rehearse anything but my Te Deum between now and the performance.
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What We Didn’t Eat
Prompted By What We Ate
/ Stories
Half of what’s in our fridge today, I hadn’t even heard of in 1965!
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The Middle of Nowhere
Prompted By Something Wild
/ Stories
Rob says, okay John, you get to lead the way back, and I smile and giggle and I say are you sure, and he says sure.
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No Marketable Skills
Prompted By Technology Tribulations
/ Stories
“What are you going to do?” they asked. “You’re an academic!"
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Weekend hours? Don’t make me laugh.
Little GTO
Prompted By My First Car
/ Stories
Turn it on, wind it up, blow it out, GTO. Yeah, that was me.
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Klondike Day
Prompted By Camp
/ Stories
We could get credit for the golden boulder—if we could somehow transport it to the assayer’s office without getting robbed.
Read More
Jerusalem
Prompted By Travel
/ Stories
We spotted three girls across the street. When they saw us they giggled, whispered among themselves, and waved shyly.
Read More
1776
Prompted By Independence
/ Stories
Don't miss the show-stopper, "Molasses to Rum to Slaves," about Northern complicity in the slave trade. Seriously.
Read More
The Elvis Wedding
Prompted By Ceremony
/ Stories
We wrote our own vows, read from Sandburg, Saint-Exupéry, and Gibran, and sang songs by Jacques Brel and John Lennon.
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It’s a Book
Prompted By Good Bosses, Bad Bosses
/ Stories
“You understand, we can’t mention this again,” I told him. I felt like a criminal conspirator.
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The Graduate
Prompted By Graduation
/ Stories
I had hair; my grandfather didn't. So it was only fair to let him wear the mortarboard.
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Reading to Bill
Prompted By Those We Miss
/ Stories
Written in response to Something is Missing
The words rolled lyrically off my lips. Each sentence had a rhythm, a cadence.
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The Typewriter
Prompted By That Was Then, This Is Now
/ Stories
I loved how the keys plunked and the typebars clattered, the ping of the bell and the thwack of the carriage return.
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Laughter
Prompted By Those We Miss
/ Stories
Michigan seems like a dream to me now.
—Simon & Garfunkel, "America"
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Telephone Exchanges
Prompted By That Was Then, This Is Now
/ Stories
UNiversity, BUtterfield, KLondike, WOodward, YUkon—those old phone numbers were so easy to remember.
Read More
You Can’t Tell the Players Without a Scorecard
Prompted By Big Fan
/ Stories
I told them I was only eight, but I promised the announcers that when I was older I would drink Stroh’s beer and use Speedway 79 gasoline.
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Top Forty
Prompted By What We Listened To
/ Stories
Then came a series of questions about rock music, meant, I'm sure, to be my downfall.
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The Chaney Clocks
Prompted By My First Paycheck
/ Stories
Was the song meant to instill a false sense of pride in his students, or a fever dream of a school where he’d really like to teach?
Read More
Remembering Keith Emerson
Prompted By Vacations
/ Stories
Written in response to The Great Sea Rescue
Would you destroy a piano to make a music video? Keith Emerson would.
Read More
Truffle
Prompted By Pets
/ Stories
They were all cute, a mix of golden retriever and German shepherd, but she was the cutest, a fluffy round ball of fur.
Read More
Have Guitars, Will Travel
Prompted By Vacations
/ Stories
Then someone said, "You guys get up there." Bud and I looked at each other. Why the hell not?
Read More
Saying Kaddish
Prompted By Faith
/ Stories
The words roll off my tongue despite years of disuse, their rhythm like music, like chant; like Ginsberg, like Dylan.
Read More
Conscientious Objector
Prompted By The Draft & Vietnam
/ Stories
The wait seemed interminable, but the later our birthday was called, the less chance we had of being drafted.
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Scarlett O’Hara and Me
Prompted By Teenager in Love
/ Stories
Even by tenth grade, Amy had developed, like Scarlett, the ability to dangle young men from her fingertips. I dangled gladly.
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Roger and His Calvins
Prompted By What We Wore
/ Stories
Craig gained additional notoriety in 1990 when he appeared in newspaper ads modeling Calvin Klein briefs—and nothing else.
Read More
Art Lessons
Prompted By Art and Art Museums
/ Stories
Only now does the sheer phallic audacity of that picture make me chuckle.
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Confessions of a Sci-Fi Nerd
Prompted By Lost in Space
/ Stories
This guy Heinlein could really tell a story.
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My family had a rule: No comic books.
Dorm Rules
Prompted By First Day of School
/ Stories
No drugs. No alcohol, even if we were over 21. (We weren't.) No female visitors after 11 on weekdays or midnight on weekends.
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What We Learned from the Roosters
Prompted By Lessons
/ Stories
You know how roosters crow in the morning to greet the dawn? That’s a myth, we learned when we moved in.
Read More
Visits from My Grandfather
Prompted By Grandparents & Grandchildren
/ Stories
It is his scent that comes back to me most strongly: a mixture of leather, Barbasol shaving cream, and cigars.
Read More
Cash
Prompted By Best Advice: Money
/ Stories
My grandfather loved horses and gambling more than he loved my grandmother, so he spent a lot of time at the racetrack.
Read More
Cheap Thrills
Prompted By Prom
/ Stories
“What’s this?” asked Wendy. “Chocolate cream pie,” I answered helpfully. “It’s like soup,” said Jean.
Read More
A Coney Island of the Soul
Prompted By What We Ate
/ Stories
We cram sweaty into a booth, raising scarcely an eyebrow in rented tuxedos and spaghetti-strap gowns.
Read More
The Conservative
Prompted By Protests
/ Stories
Joe's hat sported not only a Nixon-Agnew campaign button but, beside it, a Goldwater button from four years earlier.
Read More
