So her oldest and dearest friend phones the girl.  "I'll come over for a couple of hours, sit with him, and you can go do something just for you," she says.

"Something like what?" the girl wants to know, hoping this isn't a pitch for pedicures, long steamy baths, and… Read full post »

Ultimately, it was the sleepwalking that sent me scurrying off to a doctor. It's weird and exhausting to wake up, say, in the diningroom or the kitchen. It's also unnerving to be acting in some dream state, dreams being the unpredictable things they are. I just hoped I wouldn't have one… Read full post »

In the second grade, when the subpar Bluebird Reading Group, the hamster sickening in it's pinched lousy cage, our wilting bean plants jammed into dented Dixie cups, or the paste eaters in the corner  all conspired to send me into a depressive tailspin, I coped by conjuring up some lie potent… Read full post »

During the late Jurassic age, I taught elementary art to get my teacher's certificate. Humping more supplies than a hundred dollar mule, I schlepped from school to school and met the wee ones. No mistake, these were tough rooms, so as an opener I'd asked the same question. How old are… Read full post »

Baylor Rehab people are great on setting goals, even when those goals are tiny and creep out us more abled types. My goal is to know when I'm going to crap. My goal is to roll my chair to the short bus. My goal is to clean my dick. And, don't… Read full post »

"Chuck Taylors," the bodyguard-sized black guy, remarked approvingly, glancing down at my feet. We were sharing an elevator at the Baylor Institute for Rehabilitation. He wore khakis, a Baylor-issued polo shirt with Baylor Rehab stitched over the tit, and enormous cross-trainers.

"Yeah," I told him… Read full post »

Friday night I ate dinner in the bathroom, which seemed weird but there was no one there to comment. I was gnawing on the roast chicken I'd bought a couple of days before, but my cats frothed into Chicken Madness with such ferocity that the Big Chicken and I fled to… Read full post »

Some things don't bear thinking on. Like what happens to Easter chicks and those free puppies at the mall. Or wondering uneasily about that child's shoe discarded and tumbling on the freeway? Or remembering my husband's body become wax, his skin turning loose and gray like a tattered garment, his mou… Read full post »

I hate that word: shitty. The word itself makes my sister go nuts: there's a sense of a great rage,  heaving breasts, rustling skirts, maybe a rolling pin. A 19th century fit coming right at you. She never actually does anything, but she leaves you feeling that she could be serious… Read full post »

Five years ago, it was my good fortune or not, depending on how Zen you are, to be mugged at four in the afternoon on a very bright April day. It was April 17, in fact, and I remember it well because it was one of the few times I didn't… Read full post »

For no reason I can fathom, when I was young I considered myself lucky, using the term vaguely as when we say someone, generally very old or rather homely, is attractive.

Actually, the fact is that no one in my extended family is lucky, or ever has been lucky, with… Read full post »