One of three caregivers providing 24-hour care for Bill, 87, and Dorothy, 82, I've known Bill ever since he got together with Dorothy about 30 years ago. He's been living with Dorothy in her house for close to 25 years. Now they both have Alzheimer's.

Though part of the family, Bill… Read full post »

I found this poem in an old email and don't remember where it came from or exactly how it got there. Sometimes I input poems from The New Yorker and email them to myself. I didn't know the poet, so I googled him.  Mr. Dunn's poem History is too good not… Read full post »

When he was three years old, my son Evan discovered dinosaurs.  By the time he was five, he had watched every BBC dinosaur documentary made to date. He watched each video every day, morning and night, for about four months. Then I would get him the next one.  Dinosaur facts and… Read full post »

Paul Simon's You Can Call Me Al is a short-story title treasure trove. A novel could come out of this song.  Straight from the lyrics, here's a rough-draft chapter outline.

1. Pink room. 2. Why am I soft in the middle now? 3. Don't wanna end up a cartoon. 4. If you… Read full post »

A Fall Piece inspired by Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood

Are you okay with pine sap in your seat on the deck?  Will you get after the blobs of it with a screwdriver? How do you feel about those who welcome fall with the art of vomiting pumpkins?  Would you prefer… Read full post »

I love photography.  I shoot almost every day.  It helps me see.

  Read full post »

He was a long-haired, ragged 19-year-old from upstate New York on a track scholarship to Stanford. He could take mescaline, drink beer, and drive, holding on to enough consciousness to keep the wheels of his Packard truck on the road. I was 17, recently set adrift by my first love, and… Read full post »

Some mornings

thoughts of him

penetrate my sleep

before my eyes

are ready to open

I'm awake

sometimes an ache

he looms invisible

behind my eyes

sometimes in a kiss

almost faded

between my thighs

Some days I stay

horizontal

I can't get any air

my ribs cave… Read full post »

Florine McLean was my second mother and I don't know where she is, or when or where she was born.  All I can tell you is that she lived in Raleigh, North Carolina between, roughly, 1952 and 1962.  She might have lived there for 40 years before that and maybe until… Read full post »

Once I had a daughter.

Then she was gone.

She disappeared.

She wasn't sick.

She didn't die.

She became a he. 

  Read full post »

Giving Your Heart to a Harley Man: This is a continuation of story segments I began with "I Thought I Was Mature" posted September 20.

After our introductory meeting over coffee, I waited for Mr. Harley (Patrick) to call. Nothing. Two weeks went by and I didn't hear a word. Since he'd… Read full post »

Froggy Girl made her way up the side of the bedspread.   When she got to the top of the basketball court that was Angelica's quilt, she heard the other toys giggling.  They didn't see her, so she crept along the edge, just below the top of the bed, to the… Read full post »

Mr. Harley—I will call him Patrick—was born the oldest of three children, the son of a Boston firefighter who regularly beat him.  When he said this to me in the first weeks of our nightly phone conversations, my heart took in the words and I shuddered at the painful image of… Read full post »

Under Ethnicity, his dating profile said Irish Irish Irish, and under Education, Ph.D. in Life.  Hailing from the land of the Blarney Stone myself, I looked at him across the table and felt that by some eerie trickery I was gazing at the face of my family.  This gave me pause… Read full post »

I'm old enough to have accumulated a dependable amount of common sense and I thought I was mature.  But I fell in love with a swaggering, gum-chewing wounded crackpot with naked women on his shirt.  Yep, we "met" on an internet dating site and—after calling me every day for months&mda… Read full post »