confessions of a reformed tourist
I’m an arrival/departure junkie. There’s really nothing sweeter than coming back to a place I left a year ago. Fights and grievances evaporate, everything appears shiny and new, and I find myself appreciating details I might never have noticed if I lived here all the time. People are happy to see me, and instead of [...]
1. I never thought I’d say this, but I haven’t done much of anything on the internet for the last year. I still post from time to time, but I haven’t written anything of substance (here) in ages, and lately I go weeks without even checking my email. This time last year I was posting [...]
P. had been living in Grenada for over five years the day she got the first water bill. At first, she thought it was a bookkeeping error, one that the utility would sort out on its own. But the bills continued to arrive, and she decided that even though she couldn’t possibly be the responsible [...]
I was standing in my kitchen, contemplating a sink full of dirty dishes and admitting to myself that I’d really love to put the chore off by calling a friend to chat, but that I can’t – easily – because I’ve been out of touch with everyone for over six months, long enough that the [...]
I’m trying to find my “just right”. I’ve always been sensitive about how I write about Grenada, the things that happen to me and around me, and especially the other people involved. There are some tales that I’ll never tell, and others in which I give once-real-life characters fictional cloaks that I hope will protect [...]
I hate Word with a burning, unbridled passion. Not only is it clunky and slow, it makes inane “corrections” to my spelling and grammar. So, mostly I used TextEdit. TextEdit is my jam. TextEdit and I like-like each other. TextEdit and I are kissing in a tree. Alas, TextEdit has a fatal flaw. No word [...]
My grandfather was a veteran of World War II. He’d been on the Normandy coast, though he missed the gruesomeness of D-Day proper. In 1998, when I visited the graveyard there, I walked down to the ocean and collected some sand for him. I filled an empty film canister. (Remember those?) It was an eerie experience. I’m [...]
One night when Bean was about eight months old, we took the subway from my dad’s house in The Bronx to my friend’s apartment on the Upper East Side. He was still Snugli-bound back then, so it was an easy trip. Pleasant. Fun. We had a good night. He found her stash of cat food [...]
West Indian slang for ejaculate (both the noun and the verb) is “break”. I thought, at first, that this was kind of weird, but the more I thought about it, the more it made perfect sense. Break? Break. Break! Yes. Exactly. There’s also a saying, something that you ask people who are just not hearing [...]
My brother has one of those video cameras with a little screen that you can flip around. I guess so that you can use it to tape yourself? Yeah. He brought it out on Tuesday to record Bean blowing out his birthday candles and opening his presents. At first he kept the monitor where he [...]
