Text Messages

The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, begins like many good tales, and plenty of bad ones, with an introduction. We don’t meet the brothers themselves, the three protagonists whose complicated relationships with their father provide most of the conflict, but instead the Karamazov patriarch. He is, to put it mildly, not the hero of this…

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Overalls

Why yes, I do remember the last time I wore overalls. Thanks for asking. I was in the tenth grade. We were performing, for reasons best known to my tenth-grade Language Arts teacher, an original play. In said play was a dance number, choreographed to an NSNYC song. We all performed. We all wore overalls with…

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Re-Discovery

Long ago, a bunch of friends and I spent a Saturday moving all of my roommate’s and my things from one part of Seattle to another. It was a pretty typical move, complete with trips to the dump in someone’s borrowed minivan, and furniture crammed in someone’s borrowed truck. The crowning achievement, at the end…

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Choosing To Imagine: An Ear of Corn & A Border Camp

I’m feeling very American, standing at my kitchen island and shucking corn. I hardly knew anyone with a kitchen island the whole time I lived in Germany, and the corn—well, that’s about as American as it gets. Because though I’ve spent plenty of summers running and hiking past cornfields in southwestern Germany, Europeans don’t eat…

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Twenties Questions

With many recognitions dim and faint,  And somewhat of a sad perplexity,  The picture of the mind revives again:  While here I stand, not only with the sense  Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts  That in this moment there is life and food  For future years. William Wordsworth, from “Tintern Abbey” It takes me…

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Grown Up Summer

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet “What’s your favorite season?” I’ve asked this question countless times, to kids all over the place,…

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Build Houses & Plant Gardens

Build houses and live in them; and plant gardens and eat their produce.Take wives and become the fathers of sons and daughters, and take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; and multiply there and do not decrease. Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile,…

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Appreciation

I went to ninth grade afraid.  Like many students who leave Christian schools, I entered the “real world” (in my case public high school) with a head full of warnings. I was somewhat apprehensive that in my first month of school I—a fourteen-year-old honors student, a decent violinist and a mediocre volleyball player—would be ridiculed…

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Honest Doubt

          You say, but with no touch of scorn,           Sweet-hearted, you, whose light-blue eyes           Are tender over drowning flies,  You tell me, doubt is Devil-born.  Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from “In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 96” I’ve never been a huge fan of Mom Blogs. (Yes, I know that they’re…

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Stolen: A Diaper Bag

It took us almost two weeks to realize that the diaper bag had been stolen. In Seattle, apparently having one’s car broken into is a rite of passage, an initiation into the club of people who really live here.  And a few weeks ago, we finished our transformation into full residents. We’ve taken the bus, endured…

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