confessions of a reformed tourist
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 [...]
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 [...]
The other week I was looking for my debit card. It wasn’t where I left it. I *know* I didn’t take it anywhere, and it’s not like me to put things away in a place other than the place I always put them. (Note to young people: This is a good strategy for remembering things. [...]
It started when he was newborn. It’s funny, you know? Because you’re pregnant for nine months, waiting for the baby. Anticipating the baby. Imagining the baby. Et cetera. And then! Labor and delivery, which is basically like military basic training, except condensed and in your vagina. And then you bring home the baby! And what [...]
I am mother and daughter, teacher and student, writer and reader. I’m woman and lover, but never have been – and likely never will be – a wife. I am a traveler, and I am fearless. I wear flip-flops in the security line, because it saves time, and I never check luggage if I can [...]
You’re too big to climb on my back but too little to monkey up the tree. You’re too big to be carried everywhere but too little to make any of your own decisions. (Except for maybe sometimes you get to choose between chicken nuggets and sunflower butter.) I never said life was fair. Or that [...]
I used to take lots of videos. Short things, nothing too special. The idea was to capture a minute’s worth of what my life in Grenada was like. What Bean was like as a baby. For a while I forgot about the videos. I was busy with other things. Primarily, being miserable. But recently I’ve [...]
It started about two years ago when Bean first figured out that neither his grandmother nor I have a penis. He was AMAZED. For a while afterward, he’d randomly point at one of us and say, “No penis?” He’d ask me. Then his grandmother. And his babysitter if she happened to be there. Once we [...]
In Grenada we lived right over Westerhall Bay. I must have spent thousands of hours sitting out there on the verandah, reading, writing, talking to my mom, playing with my son or just sitting quietly, gazing at the mountains and soaking up the astonishing shades of green. This photo speaks to me… It says peace, home, [...]
The thing about being young is that you can’t imagine forgetting. You can’t imagine that you won’t remember the name of that Italian movie, the one that takes place right after the war, the one where soldiers who aren’t supposed to be soldiers are slogging through a marsh, not knowing who they’re supposed to shoot [...]
