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But no one seemed to notice my heroic effort. Fabrice marched inexorably off the front, and Terri, Louise, Nancy and Frank passed me one by one. We breasted a ridge and Camp 2 came into sight across a basin of deep snow. I glanced behind me, gulping for breath, and realized with satisfaction that I still led three people: Marshall, Dmitri and a new, enthusiastic guide we’d acquired named Pinky. On this section the strangest thing happened.
My one-step-one-breath rhythm, a pace that had served me well on every mountain I’d ever climbed, was suddenly no longer adequate. As the lead climbers shrunk in the distance, my one-step-one-breath became one-step-two-breaths, and then one-step-three-breaths, but the additional air didn’t propel me any faster. If anything I … Read more »
I moved toward the roof of South America with the tiny, shuffling steps of an old man, looking down at the bootprints my so-called friends had left in the snow. The sight filled me with gloom. Yet it was more appetizing than what loomed above: an old volcano about 100 stories tall, the summit of Mt. Aconcagua, the object of my sweaty desire for the last two weeks, a brutal thumb of rock that was my only hope of saving face.
The only sound was the uneven rasping of my breath and a faint, chilly breeze off the Andes. Then, clank! The steel crampons of my right boot hit stone. I had reached the rock. For an hour I’d aimed for this resting spot as … Read more »
When I was six months pregnant with my son, I broke up with my mother. We were standing in her kitchen on Thanksgiving Day. It was almost nine o’clock in the morning. It was almost my third trimester.
Up until two days earlier when Michael, the father-to-be, and I left our home in Brooklyn for my hometown in Louisiana, I’d been in a state of bliss. I never left home without my ultrasound pictures, like a Jehovah’s Witness wielding Bible scripture, proclaiming proof of God in our midst. No one was exempt from blow-by-blow reports on the baby’s every move, my every craving, graphic details of my birth plan. My elation was incorrigible, invincible, I thought. But I hadn’t yet seen my mother, and … Read more »
There are true stories that are unfortunate. Then there are true stories that are really really unfortunate. I was kidnapped, tortured, robbed and released while traveling on business in Shenzhen, China, exactly 5 years, 21 days and 14.5 hours ago but who’s counting. At this pt in time feels like it happened to somebody else.
I’m a bona fide New Yorker with street smarts so it is embarrassing to say I was mugged in China where muggings are rare. Anyway, on my 2nd day in Shenzhen, a city of 12 million, I was casually walking down a side street when four guys jumped me, dragged me into a dimly lit apartment, stripped me of my clothes, shredded my wallet, and … Read more »
No one had to tell us we lived in a shack at the bottom of Chestnut Hill. We knew we lived in a shack but it was our shack. We loved it and were happy in it. All around us there were beautiful houses with large manicured lawns. Mom said they were old Victorian houses with warm fireplaces and indoor toilets and bathtubs. Some houses even had gorgeous race horses fenced in and grazing in their backyards. Mama said the rich people wanted our shack condemned and torn down because it was an eyesore. Pop said we will live in our shack until they kick us out and that is what we did and we were happy.
It was actually a two-family house. We lived … Read more »
There's a little sign on the dashboard of my 1975 Chevy van that says, "Are we there yet?"
It started off as a joke, a question I would ask myself, not to determine if I was closing in on the next city, the next campground, the next rest stop or the next job. I wanted to know if I was happy yet.
Maybe deep down inside that's what we're all asking, "Am I there yet?"
"Am I happy? Am I successful? Am I loveable? Am I brilliant? Am I good enough? Am I smart enough? Am I competent?"
I'm sitting here with my utilities off, my van packed and the question hanging heavily in my mind.
"Do I move back in the van, keep the apartment, … Read more »
Six words. Six little words. I was mortified. It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic.
My Dad picks me up from the airport and we drive seven miles to sit in a sports bar in Ferndale the night before Thanksgiving. It’s tradition. We order from a happy hour bar menu. We are not rushing to thaw a turkey, and we pity the people who do. Our eyes fixate just over each other’s heads as we watch the Seahawks on two separate wide-screen televisions. Communication isn’t really our thing. Our cheeseburgers arrive with everything on them, despite my detailed instructions for everything on the side.
“There’s mayonnaise on … Read more »
I was born in 1960 into a blue-collar lower income family on Long Island twenty-five miles from New York City. My family had a strong sense of giving to the community. My dad is a volunteer fireman and has been for over fifty years.
Somehow I always seemed to find the trouble. My mom always said I was a good kid, but my dad well that was another story. He would say “good kid? He was never good to go bad!” I guess that was the struggle that I had to fight alone. At the age of 16 I was arrested for shoplifting. This began a string of criminal activity that became the beginning of the end.
In January 1978 a few months prior to my 18th … Read more »
I believe the bridal bouquet toss, like capers in salad dressing or advertising in restroom stalls, is perfectly ridiculous and should be done away with immediately.
Last week at my cousin’s elegant and boisterous wedding, I was bantering with an acquaintance when I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was a family friend’s mom, donned in a sky blue suit that offset her ash gray hair.
“Hi, Mrs. Karras,” I said and kissed her on the cheek. “You look pretty tonight.”
“Not now,” she said and recoiled. Her manner implied she had discovered a live grenade in the courtyard, or that the caterer was low on baklava.
“Your cousin’s about to toss the bouquet,” she said and pointed to the throng of single women gathering on the … Read more »
For two years after college I rented an apartment in The Gables, a cheaply-constructed condo community where budding yuppies flock to breed. The Gables is famous for its pool: Throughout the summer young singles gather there like mosquitoes in a birdbath. A few swim laps, but mostly they wade. In the shallow end.
That the entire Gables neighborhood is painted in shades of beige is a perfect metaphor -- or a beacon of warning, depending how you see it -- for the homogeneous hell that lies within.
At the time I was living the prescribed life of a young Potomac Jew. It never occurred to me to question my fate; In a year or so I'd meet a Jewish doctor/lawyer/consultant and float down the aisle in big … Read more »
"Yo man. Let me get this straight. You teach five hours a week and they pay you 50 G's?"
It wasn't a rhetorical question. Calvin, who as far I know answers only to "Hot Rod," was expecting an answer, and I wasn't sure what to say – especially since I was pretty sure that Hot Rod didn't even know that I don't teach in the summers.
"Dawg, I'm in the classroom five hours, but I spend a lot more time preparing for class. It's just like out here, baby (I shove the basketball into the pit of his stomach); I only teach your ass for about an hour, but I spent years perfecting those pretty moves."
Hot Rod chuckles at the lie. I play hard, have a passable … Read more »
In the summer of 1984, when I should have been pursuing a path befitting of a college graduate, I took a detour instead to places less ambitious and more nefarious: Male strip joints. It wasn’t until I reached rock bottom (no pun intended) – when I was unceremoniously kicked out of one of the seedier clubs for my bad behavior and watched as a policeman handcuffed my God-fearing, cross-wearing best friend Linda – that I climbed out of the gutter and onto higher ground.
The timing of my descent was as well-defined as the moment I regained my footing. It began when my longtime boyfriend told me he loved me, then disconnected his phone the following day: my graduation day. It continued with a couple of … Read more »
Memoirs, it is often said, are a confluence of memory and imagination. This fragment of my memoir is true.
Going to college In Nashville, I had a girlfriend, Lynne Lastname, from Evansville, Indiana. Pretty. Tall, thin, long blond hair. A “real” blonde. It‘s easy to tell. Anyway, I met her at a SCLC meeting about a month before Kennedy was shot.
On that sad November day, I was reading to a blind student from Kentucky, Barry Lastname, when my roommate, Terry Lastname, walked in and told me the news from Dallas. Lynne and I spent a lot of time together in late November being pissed off at the senselessness of the assassination and quite depressed along with the rest of the country.
Wrote a short, … Read more »
In the last several months, I've taken up horse riding. Until recently, I had had a single experience on a horse when I was 17 and on a camping trip in upstate New York with my high school boyfriend. Let's just say that it was short-lived and ended with the horse running back to the stable after nibbling my feet. I asked for my money back.
I was never what you would call an athletic kid. It's not that I wasn't fit. I danced from the age of 3 —ballet, modern and tap. I was raised by intellectual, artist-types. My mother is a classic New York Jew who believes if you perspire you are working too hard and should immediately return to the air-conditioned salon … Read more »
Things fell apart at the Godfather Party. As a lapsed Catholic and an Italian who moved away from the extended family, I knew my choices regarding to the holidays: I could lament there’s no grandmother in our kitchen sautéing garlic in the morning and layering the meat, cheese and eggs for a pizza rustica. I could long for the days when a family hike up to my grandfather’s Hudson Valley grape vines was the best way to get an appetite for apple pie. Or, I could rally my husband and daughter to make our holidays in the Midwest exactly what we want: fun and, if possible, infused with some variety of faith. It took us a year to learn this was much easier said than … Read more »
Some people write memoirs or keep journals. I make lists. Some of the lists have been around for years and just keep getting updated. Some are static. Some I make annually. Some are weekly. Some are just one-time lists. You get the idea.
Anyway, as 2008 was coming to a close, I was exporting items from past lists into fresh 2009 ones. And as I combed through, I realized that read in chronological order, the lists tell a lot about "My Life So Far." (For another, longer look at my life story through a series of lists, check out my story my longer story on SMITH's Memoirville section.)
I admit that by putting my lists on the table like this will most likely reveal … Read more »
I was 20 years old, a full-time college student, and minutes away from meeting Terry, one of the greatest friends I would ever have. I pulled up to his upper middle-class suburban neighborhood nestled against the foothills on the West side of Denver and was thinking how much I needed this job—the pay was double my part-time hourly rate at the convenience store and this job sounded much more fulfilling than mopping floors, working a cash register and working for ol' lady Myrna who was late to relieve me every night at 11 PM when my shift was over.
I was nervous about interviewing for a job so unlike any job I’d applied for before. All I knew from my … Read more »
I come from thoughtful people. Every option is carefully considered and the alternatives painstakingly weighed. Then, unfortunately, we inevitably make absurd decisions based upon nothing more than the instinct of lemmings and complete impatience with the process of actually thinking things through to some logical conclusion.
When my darling son moaned pitifully for a pet when he was about 8, there was every reason to wait since we had just moved from the city to the suburbs and we were like Moses in the Bible: a stranger in a strange land. We realized the importance of my son acclimating himself to a new school and new friends. We never had a pet before so we had to train ourselves before … Read more »
It was mid-morning on the first crisp cold day of October, the sort of fall day when one can feel the melancholy of winter suffocating the air, when I stood on an overlook of the Snake River Canyon, just a few hundred feet from the Perrine Bridge. I had walked to the end of the walking-trail to the last overlook, with the belief it was the most secluded and there would be less of a chance someone would stop me. I imagined that jumping would feel like flying until I hit the ground at which point would come the release that I so desperately longed for. I wasn’t afraid to die and I wasn’t afraid of the possible pain or repercussions ahead of me on … Read more »
I am your complete lack of control eating you up from the inside.
Lick, lap, bite.
I have no reasons; I have no knowledge, all I have is the innate desire to destroy. So I destroy.
Myself.
My life.
And it just continues on and on.
I try to write to understand why, but I have no point of reference so I can't understand why, because this is all there is.
I go from person to person searching for something to complete me, but every single person cannot live up to my idealized expectations, so they fail.
I think I make them fail purposely.
But I really don't know.
Bang. I shot myself in the foot again.
And I promise, I will do it again, just because I can.
I think it … Read more »
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