On writing fiction
by PINOY PHOTOGRAPHER I can only imagine what the months following my father’s death felt like for my mother. Though she had always worked as an elementary school teacher and made her own money, she must have missed my father’s companionship. They had long and routine conversations despite the fact that she regularly criticized him. […]
Of Companionship, Black and Blue, and The Buddhist Monk’s Pyre … Read More »
The woman who had slammed into the back of my Toyota 4-Runner was not happy. “What were you doing stopped up there in the middle of the street?” she demanded.
“I was making a turn,” I said.
Sunlight bounced off her strawberry blond hair as she looked past me to the street where the impact had occurred. The debris of glass and the right half of my back bumper lay on the pavement no more than 500 yards from where we stood.
She sighed in consternation then whipping around, walked to her SUV, its front
Of Worth, “ … Calling My Husband,” and “ … I’m Sorry,” … Read More »
by Don White (Central Park, Burnaby) My mother had remained calm in the wake of my father, her husband’s death. She later admitted missing him, an admission I found confusing at best since she so-often criticized him, and not until after his death listed the personality traits for that in her opinion had made him
Of an Isuzu Trooper, Consternation and ‘We’ll See’ … Read More »
by Don White (Central Park, Burnaby) It resounded like a rifle firing, perhaps a cannon ball landing. An SUV had slammed into the back of my SUV. My head hit the back of the headrest. I went dizzy. “Stay calm,” I coached myself. “You’re still in the driver’s seat.” I had slowed to make a
Of U-Turns, A Jeep Wrangler, and Explosions … Read More »
by JCT(Loves)Streisand* One day while visiting home in North Carolina–I had married and was living in Boston–my mother, while picking out a dress to wear to a funeral commented that she had refused her first proposal because the man who had requested her hand did not, she believed, own enough financial capital. Financial capital for
Of Marriage Proposals, Regret and Capital … Read More »
by JCT(Loves)Streisand* My first pregnancy occurred when I was twenty-seven. It was planned. A young minister’s wife had said, after hearing my lament the emptiness I was feeling then in the fourth year of my marriage, “You need a child.” This was probably an easy response for her to make in that at twenty-eight
Of Marriage, Freedom, and A First Pregnancy … Read More »
Leaving my mother and marrying my husband did not free me of her words, nor her way of thinking and perceiving myself and the world. It, in fact. strengthened the critic within me.
Fed, clothed and nurtured by my mother and her harsh words, the inner critic, was my connection to my mother. Painful as it could be, I embraced the inner critic, not knowing what I was doing.
I was going to be the perfect wife. With my husband away much of the time for wor
Of Patterns by Vogue, Seeking Perfection and The Inner Critic … Read More »