Month: January 2016

It takes grace to break the rules with style

It takes grace

For one, from one, to one.

Say, you gathered a group of five of your White friends and five of Your Black friends and asked them to have a no-holds barred discussion about race.

My prediction echoes Major Strasser in Casablana, “You would find the conversation a trifle one-sided.”

Your Black friends would be ready, their ideas formed, their sentences flowing like legal arguments pitched by Harvard-trained attorneys in front of the Supreme Court.

Your White friends would nod.

It’s true. I know of which I speak. I’ve been one of the mute, nodding White people.

I think there are a lot of reasons why White people are so tongue-tied when it comes to race.

They don’t know what they think. This is because, on any given day, they think a thousand different random things about race depending on which Black person they saw or talked to or thought about that day. Black guy at a…

A Cheese Omelet at Midnight

You can’t ever leave without saying something,
no matter how insipid. That sweater looks good
on you. It’s supposed to rain tomorrow. I’m sorry
I burned the omelet. Nasdaq has plunged 3% 

since last week. And I, in return, can’t let you go without
replying in equal measure. It matches your eyes. I love
to smell rain in August. That cheddar was delicious.
Maybe I’ll start a savings account. Next month.

So I wash dishes when you’re gone, wipe down the
counters, pour salt into the shaker, grab a book, join my
cat in bed. This tune’s been overplayed, the grooves’re
worn down. Maybe next time I’ll say what I mean,

tell you what I want: It would look better in a heap
on the floor. How about a shower here, tonight? Kiss
me and I’ll never think of it again. I don’t give a…

In a land before transformation, where a corpulent charcoal moon tracks a faraway sun one cannot see black from white such is the blinding brume of eternal eclipse. It is there that the archer is superfluous, the hunter marksman nonessential. No place for transparent miracles, imperturbable martyrs, just wishful thinking fumbling lovers.  No pistols at dawn in such foggy places, no arrow can be aimed in such murk for what prevails befriends only the little brown mushroom and the three blind mice.  The language spoken in this place neglected to baptise the philosopher’s aspirational understanding of the fundamental causes and principles of a universe unexposed.

Testosterone charged Big Chuck drove a monster four by four something or other. His expedition into the Dark Forest of Out There Somewhere had gone horribly wrong yet ever the sucker to prove an urban myth his quest to capture the Ghostly Virgin of the…

I was never one of those moms who grieved their kids growing up. I thought it was great.

I didn’t want them to be babies forever. Or to be toddling around the house indefinitely. I didn’t want to stand on the sidelines of wet soccer fields with a cold cup of coffee watching confused kids kick the ball to each other on Saturday mornings that seemed to last for months. I liked being the mother of little kids but only because of its impermanence.

I love that my kids are grown up. And I say that without the least bit of angst.

Oh, I look back and I remember them as little kids. How I carried them everywhere, how I stroked their cheeks to calm them, laid on the couch with their little selves asleep on my chest, sang to them songs I made up and that no one else…