Before further conversation, I grabbed my brown suitcase, the one Derek was still holding in his hand. “I think I’ll make the switch before we forget,” I said with a wry laugh.
Ignoring me, he tapped his finger on his forehead. “I knew I recognized you. Bob. Bob’s girlfriend.”
“Ex- girlfriend,” I interrupted quickly. (Story begins with The Wrong One and then Summertime Baggage.)
Derek continued, “At my parent’s Christmas party in Brookline. Bob and I were…” Continue reading
Halfway through the third piece of chocolate, my apartment bell rang.
Too late for a UPS delivery or for a friend to stop by.
Definitely too late for Bob (see last week’s The Wrong One...).
I hit my pink-manicured finger on the speaker and asked, “Yes?” Only it sounded more like, “Yethhh?” since I was swallowing the last bit of dark chocolate caramel.
“Sloan?” a male voice inquired. “Ms. Molly Sloan?”
I had a bad feeling about this, but I couldn’t deny the inevitable. Continue reading
It’s taken me 89 years, two months, and 26 days to figure it out.
But Lord help me, I have figured out what no one told me all these living days.
I don’t blame the people in my early life. My grandmother’s folk (she had 14 siblings) spent their lives just surviving. The earlier generations didn’t have time to figure out what was real, because life was just too damned hard.
But we technocratic, soft-skinned, thin-skinned spoiled people of the 21st century – we have no excuse. We have toilets and warm showers and grocery stores packed with food. We have vehicles of all sizes and shapes to transport us anywhere; free education from 5 to 18 years; easy chairs to sit in and stare into our gas fireplaces just to ponder. No need to chop our wood and cook our meat on that fire. We just use it to warm our souls and ponder. Yes, to just think.
Not that thinking helped me figure it out. The opposite, really. Continue reading
As I placed my head on the pillow to sleep, I suddenly thought about Artie. My heart choked up as if something was squeezing it, hard.
The pain pushed the blood, salt, and tears out of my soul.
I rose out of bed, realizing that sleep was impossible, and walked quietly, almost hypnotically, over to the master bath. What I needed was a good long soak in the tub . . . Continue reading
I’ve had my head down since 6 a.m., after I brewed my hot green tea, prepared the 1½ graham crackers I allow myself each early morning, and settled into my writing table at our second story home office. An hour and a half later, seemed like minutes, I finally notice that my tea is cold, and I look up.
I gasp. Continue reading
