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About my hair. Seriously.
It was with a mix of delight and anxiety that I read in today’s Guardian that the perm is making a comeback. You read that right. Hair-rising news that takes me back to that day a few years ago when a middle-aged bald man reached across an impressive stretch of time and distance to announce on my Facebook page, “Hey!” “HEY!!!” “Didn’t we used to call you Crystal Tipps?” Indeed you did. Relentlessly. And, it was funnier to you than it was to me. Teetering on the edge of adolescence in the early seventies, I instinctively knew that Crystal’s coiffure, a big triangular purple frizz, belonged only on the BBC,…
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Aging, Art, Children's Books, Coming of age, Death of parent, Education, Fatherless daughters, learning to drive, Memoir, Milestones, Mother Daughter Relationship, Mr. Jones, Poetry, Rituals, The Gone of You
commencement exercises
Home is where I want to be Pick me up and turn me round I feel numb – born with a weak heart I guess I must be having fun The less we say about it the better Make it up as we go along Feet on the ground Head in the sky It’s ok I know nothing’s wrong… nothing At my daughter’s high school graduation, the Senior class filed into the auditorium to the sound of the Talking Heads – “This Must be the Place (Naive Melody). A perfectly hip processional, it was one of her father’s favorite songs, five minutes of toe-tapping polyphony. I had never been so…
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airing laundry . . . mother’s day in america
Old Smoothing Iron by Seamus Heaney Often I watched her lift it from where its compact wedge rode the back of the stove like a tug at achor. To test its heat by ear she spat in its iron face or held it up next her cheek to divine the stored danger. Soft thumps on the ironing board. Her dimpled angled elbow and intent stoop as she aimed the smoothing iron like a plane into linen like the resentment of women To work, her dumb lunge says, is to move a certain mass through a certain distance, is to pull your weight and feel exact and equal to it. Feel…
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favorite teacher, Frank O'Connor, Great teachers, Memoir, Mr. Jones, Music, Short Stories, Teacher Appreciation Week, Teaching, Themes of childhood
mr. jones and me . . . in appreciation of a teacher
There’s no word in the language I revere more than ‘teacher.’ My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher. This week, I will not be the only one to invoke Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides. All over America, during Teacher Appreciation Week, we honor teachers and their craft with public fanfare and more personal gestures as well. It’s the time of year when some teachers are counting down the days until school’s out for summer, while others are figuring out how to make every instructional minute matter until the final bell rings…
