There was a little gallery on 9^th Avenue around the corner from my house and they hung pictures people had taken that had to do with 9/11. There were some unbelievable shots of the site, people on the street, firefighters and police, things that made your heart stop… Read full post »

 

Last week and the week before were testing weeks for grades three to eight in New York state. The week of 16^th was the ELA (English Language Arts) test and last week was math. I teach 8^th-grade ELA, in addition to 9^th-grade ELA and 12^th-grade AP English. I… Read full post »

Four days after 9/11 I took home a five-pound bundle in a taxi with my mom. My son was born on 9/10/01 in Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan. I was in a room on the 12^th floor and I could see the Twin Towers from my window. He was/… Read full post »

I didn’t have a good boss until I was 46, except my supervisor when I taught in Japan, and I’m going to leave that out for now. I had a terrible experience with employment, which is ironic since I’d wanted to work since I was 10. I was… Read full post »

Our girls are beating the crap out of each other, and we wonder what’s going on. I’m an English teacher at a 6^th – 12^th grade public school in the Bronx and my colleagues and I are puzzling over what seems to be a dramatic rise in girl fights./… Read full post »

The corner of 31^st and 8^th Avenue has got to be one of the most inauspicious-looking places in all of Manhattan. The main post office is to the left, and there’s nothing wrong with it; in fact it’s quite stately, if with an aura of very faded glory.… Read full post »

My little boy was born on the day before 9/11. I was in Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan at 59th and 10th on the 12th floor when the planes hit the Twin Towers. You could see the towers straight from my window. People had been watching the news in the… Read full post »

I’m completely not anti-cop, I’m not. I have a little anti-authority built in, but I’m not anti-cop. I respect the position cops are in, anywhere, and in NYC, especially. This is a huge city, teeming with chaos, and on any given day, depending where you are, yo… Read full post »

I was 20 years old before I got my own room, except for the one year when my sister went to college ahead of me. She’s 13 months older than I and we shared a bedroom all my life. When I went off to college I of course had… Read full post »

The edge of the knife doesn’t have to be drug or alcohol use, dramatic love affairs, criminal activity, or anything so extreme and crazy/insane as that. In fact the mundane can be so much more harrowing and insidious. It’s what you allow to go on in your mind… Read full post »

An unspecified number of years ago I was in graduate school—for the first time, not the time I went back to get certification for my teaching job. I was getting a Masters in English after taking 10 years to finish my B.A. in the same subject. The reasons/… Read full post »

 Soft, afternoon, winter light from my window 

When my 10-year-old son woke up, sat on the side of the bed and promptly threw up all over the floor last Thursday I was immediately overjoyed. Don’t get me wrong, I felt bad for him, he’s my baby, but the… Read full post »

You may or may not know that National Public Radio (NPR) has a three-minute fiction contest every year. The deadline is usually in fall—this year it fell on 9/25/11. A different writer judges the contest each year, and there is a theme. This year it was “Arriving and Leavin/… Read full post »

I used to reflect more, and I think it’s because I had more time. In particular when I was younger I was always setting these kind of false marks—last year at this time I was doing this, a week ago today I was doing that, and so on.… Read full post »

 

I have to dismantle the above-pictured raft when I go to my sister’s in Minneapolis for the holidays. What does that have to do with anything? you might be asking. And that’s a legitimate question. But what you don’t know is that all the peccadill… Read full post »

"Portrait of Adolf Loos, 1909" by Oskar Kokoschka  

After my son was born on 9/10/01 (a whole story), I was scouting around for articles to write, or something, and a friend of a friend referred me to a friend who was starting up a magazine called Seasoned… Read full post »

She’s tall and sloe-eyed with blond hair and high cheekbones, around 32—a real funky kind of Asian-Nordic look. My son and I asked her to take care of our fish about three years ago while we went to see our family in the Midwest. She has a… Read full post »