The weight was almost unmanageable.   When I was young my mother owned a manual typewriter, all metal and heft. It came in a box like a suitcase with a latch and plastic handle, and I was certain it weighed more than I did.  The machine itself was cream and gray with seafoam-green accents straight out of the 1960s. It smelled of ink and machine oil. Trapezoid keytops bore letters in a san-serif font on heavy plastic, and there was no number 1 - my mom explained the lowercase L doubled for the number. The keybasket where all the typebars come together was embossed with the silver words "De Luxe" atop a wash of seafoam.  The keys didn't yield like computer keyboards nowadays - back then if I wanted to communicate I had to put effort behind it, jam my point home with just my index fingers. On that machine my mom taught me my first typed sentence, about the goings-on of a quick red fox and a lazy brown dog.  I didn't have much else to write about in elementary school. I ...

"Do we have to pay for water?" my daughter asked last week as she played with Dolphin Magic Barbie and Jet Ski Stacie in the bath.  She's 7, and still discovering the where's and why's of how things work in our household. Recently we'd told her not to leave the garden hose running, because it wastes both water and money.  I explained that yes, we pay a utility company to send clean water through our pipes and into the tubs, faucets, and hoses.  "If you ever need money to pay for water, you can take some of my money," she offered.  As I looked into the face of this sweet girl I'm raising, I was moved by her open-hearted generosity, unselfishness, and willingness to help. And I knew exactly what not to say.  Barbie's Bathtub Adventures Growing up, my family frequently struggled to pay the bills . I remember around age 8 repeating to my Girl Scouts leader that we had an "outstanding Visa bill" even though I had no idea what that meant....

This week, the powers that be announced Bed Bath & Beyond is closing for good. The news wasn't surprising, but I still feel disappointment. It was a store for seminal changes in life. Going to college, moving into your first apartment or home, getting married, getting divorced - any situation that required starting anew.  With its closing, a few generations of consumers lose a store closely tied to our milestones and memories. We're left with only the part that is Beyond. BBB was often the go-to place for buying (or registering to get gifts of) towels, storage options, organization, bedding, small appliances, dishes, cookware, and more. With the help of his mom, my husband bought several cart-loads of items there when he purchased his first home just before we met. We registered there for wedding gifts, most of which we still use 15 years later.   Local columnist and author Connie Schultz recently  shared a poignant story of shopping at BBB after a divorce. Shor...

I'm standing in that unused space between the kitchen and the raised dining room with the fake parquet floor. In front of me is a waist-high set of black wire shelves where my dad keeps the detritus of his day - wallet, plastic coin pouch that he squeezes to open, bits of paper with notes about Jesus being Lord and yesterday's lotto numbers. And he's yelling at me: "Extraneous details! I don't need extraneous details!" I'm 7 or 11 or 9, and he can't name my school teachers, my favorite cartoons, or the friend at whose house I just slept over. All those details I try to tell him about my days or my nights, in that winding and never-to-the-point way of children's stories, are cut off with a scolding that I am drowning him in a wash of tiny, impertinent minutiae. Points so fine you'd think he'd been stabbed.    I feel shrunken and unimportant, like a once-intricate wax figure melted down into a blob of generalities.  7-year-old me So when my s...

She was the strongest person I'll ever know. I don't have appropriate words to describe my mother. It wasn't that she was determined, because that implies an overall plan of action. She just kept going. I wouldn't call it perseverance, because that invokes the idea that eventually she prevailed. She didn't; she just kept going. She was not quite persistent or tenacious, and certainly not resolute or steadfast. She woke up every day and did what had to be done all day long, no matter how difficult or unfair or unpleasant. She was not energetic or particularly positive or even hopeful. She just kept going. When the car broke down on the side of the road, she walked with the groceries in her arms. When the electricity was shut off for a week, she heated my bath water on a Coleman stove in the kitchen and carried it to the tub. When my chronically unemployed father couldn't put food on the table, she visited the local food pantry in the next town as often as t...

Dear Me, It is May 1998. Right now you are merely 17 but you've survived enough hardship to make you a bona fide adult, if that's how we're counting. Keep going. It will get worse before it gets better, but I promise it will get better. Some day you will soar. In the meantime, I hope you'll suffer me to give you a few bits of advice. It's about your mother. A twisty subject, I know, especially as you are on the cusp of breaking free of this town and the crushing weight of your childhood. But please listen and take these things to heart. I'm going to save you a lot of regret. Record her voice. It doesn't matter what she says -- hello or I'm going outside for a smoke or the quick red fox jumps over the lazy brown dog . (Remember when she taught you how to peck that phrase on her massive manual typewriter? The keys struck so hard, punctuation scarred the backs of her pages.) Make sure, though, that she says your name. Years from now you'll unde...

So here we are. My hometown: a few square miles of Southeast Texas known for rice elevators, ill-timed trains, a Sam's distribution center, and a couple of state prisons. It's probably been 10 years since I was last here, and I didn't picture coming back. Some say you can never go home again. I can't seem to leave. South of town, about 2 miles past the old high school with the wrong-colored tiles, there will be a street on the left. It used to be called Oak Lane and was gravel, but now it's paved and goes by a different name -- as most things do when they've been upgraded. This house on the left at the dead end, this white brick one, is where I moved the summer before 2nd grade. That's the spot on the street where I fell off my bike on my 7th birthday and got stitches in my head. Right there by the trees is where we buried our Siamese cat. This is where I first learned about utility bills, and how the city could shut off your electricity in the middl...

L. O., 65, was declared dead February 24, 2016. He was found by police in his rusted10-foot travel trailer which stank of mildew and stale cigarette smoke and was piled with trash, old newspaper clippings, and indecipherable notes written on the backs of Wal-mart receipts. In the absence of knowing what he wished done with his remains, L.'s family opted for the easiest and least expensive route of cremation. Pace-Stancil Funeral Home is handling arrangements, because they happened to be the mortuary on call that morning. Born on March 11, 1950, in greater Cleveland, L. was a graduate of high school and college, though he made no discernible use of his education. He was a veteran of the U.S. Air Force for which he flew large, angry planes over Vietnam. Throughout his adult life his chronic unemployment was interrupted by an intermittent series of jobs, each apparently less skilled than the one before, which resulted in his living in several states including Arkansas, Missouri, C...

Three years ago today I found myself sitting in a darkened exam room, clutching an ultrasound image, crying. Crying so hard the ultrasound technician excused herself to "give me a moment." These weren't tears of happiness or relief, but of a disappointment I was unable to contain: I had just been told that I was having a boy. What kind of horrible mother are you?  you're probably thinking. I wondered that too. For three-and-a-half years I had struggled to have a child, and out of that struggle came a miracle. Yet here I was feeling like what I had graciously been given wasn't enough. I didn't just want a baby . I wished for a daughter . I had some reasons for feeling this way, flimsy though they seem now. First, I don't know (or care) much about things little boys are typically interested in -- dinosaurs and dump trucks and sports, bodily emissions and pratfalls and comic books. What would my son and I bond over? How would I ever connect with him? Se...

My father is one of the reasons I chose to have a child. Not to honor him or continue my lineage, but to fix the parts that he broke.  Too many of my memories are of a childhood and family irreparably damaged, achingly sad, or completely dysfunctional. I wanted to replace these memories with positive ones of my own creation, and to experience through my child’s eyes the childhood I didn’t have. Sure, it’s terribly selfish and probably more than a little misguided. But people have had children for far worse and far fewer reasons.  For example, take the playground. My father rarely played with us in the yard. There was no kicking soccer balls, throwing baseballs, no balls of any kind really. We grew up food-stamps-poor, so there were rarely any trips to local museums or science centers or cultural events. But we did have Sunday Family Day sometimes when I was little, where the four of us would pile in my father’s shit brown Ford mini pick-up truck and go somewhere l...

Many years ago I read or heard the line, “We were like strangers who knew each other very well.” I have more or less adopted this quote as a description of the relationship between my father and me. More than strangers but less than estranged, we talk on the phone a few times a year but we stick to surface streets. He thinks I am closed off and private; I know where his post office box is located but don’t know where he sleeps at night. He lives 1,200 miles away, so at least I am spared the awkward side-hugs and desperate attempts at normal conversation. My mother is dead and my brother has ceased contact, so he clings to me like his last hope at family.  That about sums it up. Father’s Days are tough. There just aren’t any greeting cards that accurately reflect our relationship. So a few years ago I decided Hallmark or American Greetings needed to get on this. Along with a friend, I came up with several gems I was going to pitch to them. The best one was: (front) When...