Better takeout was thriving in DeKalb County,but the school system hadn’t caught up,its languages unable to support the Greek bakery,dim-sum parlors, or lox-and-bagel shops.We knew the Roman Empire went beyond Italyand Pizza Hut was not quite Italian,but we had to distinguish Latin partiesfrom the French, Spanish, and German.Latin drew the kids who would opt for …
Someone stops over unannounced like the old days,so I pop open that bottle of Sancerre I’ve been saving.Talk turns to carp that reached the roadwayafter Thursday’s three inches of rain, how some saidInvasive, let them die, others said Naturalized,let them live, someone asked for a net and others saidthey’d catch them with their hands. I …
I’d heard plenty about how a mother’s devotion to her kids is primal. I got it—I could imagine that sort of wild, beyond-the-brain love, the kind of protectiveness that can sprout claws and incisors. I expected having a child to change my priorities, my routines, my capacity for tenderness and rage. I didn’t expect it …
8 September 1330, Nativity of Mary The collective berserk occasioned by the visit of the chanting Benedictines at the Assumption has ebbed at long last, and no one is now shrieking in the cloisters. Much has happened since I last wrote. Sister Heloise has been stripped, shamed, and dispatched by ox to her home in …
The Canadian comes to us with blue-black eyes and a forehead like the cliffs of Santorini. We think that he is Greek, but the Canadian is quick to correct us. He is Jewish, and he is standing in my doorway, and he wants to know the way to Giorgos’s taverna. Yianni looks the Canadian up …
At home working on a client’s website—an archive of Yiddish memories—I look up in time to see a yellow poplar topple.Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day.The hummingbirds have arrived like they do every April,flitting toward the lower branch of a weeping willowto the only one of five feeders that remains.Year after year, even their offspring remember. …
Tonight we the living gather to meditate on death—while eating hamburger sliders, in fact, and pumpernickel crackers spread with pâté, plus celery and carrots and various berries and wine that comes in a box but is not that tacky college kind. The spread is part of the funeral home’s Life Well Lived package, which also …
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