By this point in my stay, my list of don’ts covered three pages and included such reminders as: never fall asleep in a Dumpster, never underestimate a bee, never drive a convertible behind a flatbed t...
My first semester I had only nine students. Hoping they might view me as professional and well prepared, I arrived bearing name tags fashioned in the shape of maple leaves.
My feet are completely flat, but for most of my life they were still shaped like feet. Now, thanks to bunions, they're shaped more like states, wide boring ones that nobody wants to drive through.
Cover your glass in France or Germany --even worse, in England - and in the voice of someone who has personally affronted, your host will ask why you're not drinking. 'Oh, I just don't feel like it th...
Most often, our water is shut off because of some reconstruction project, either in our village or in the next one over. A hole is dug, a pipe is replaced, and within a few hours things are back to no...
Missing a nose. With these children Santa has to be careful not to ask, And what would you like for Christmas?
Look, I’ll say to Jesus, enough is enough. I suggest we nail some boards together and have ourselves an old-fashioned crucifixion.
Dad wants to talk about her death—he needs to—but unlike the rest of us, who yak incessantly about our feelings, he has no vocabulary for it and is reduced to the clichés you’d find on a sympathy card...
Like any normal fifth grader, I preferred my villains to be evil and stay that way, to act like Dracula rather than Frankenstein's monster, who ruined everything by handing that peasant girl a flower....
July 3, 1981 Raleigh There is a new cancer that strikes only homosexual men. I heard about it on the radio tonight.
I’ll do the snails on cinnamon toast.
I’d always been afraid of sick people, and so had my mother. It wasn’t that we feared catching their brain aneurysm or accidentally ripping out their IV. I think it was their fortitude that frightened...
It's always so satisfying when you can twist someone's hatred into guilt--make her realize that she was wrong, too quick to judge, too unwilling to look beyond her own petty concerns.
It was like watching someone you hate getting mugged: three seconds of hard-core violence, and when it was over you just wanted it to happen again.
It means ‘female dog,’ I’d explained to my sisters, but it also means ‘a woman who’s crabby and won’t let you be yourself.
It hardly seems fair we'd get the universe all to ourselves...
Increasingly at Southern airports, instead of a good-bye or thank-you, cashiers are apt to say, Have a blessed day. This can make you feel like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne....
In order to get the things I want, it helps me to pretend I’m a figure in a daytime drama, a schemer. Soap opera characters make emphatic pronouncements. They ball up their fists and state their goals...
In binghamton, new york, winter meant snow, and though I was young when we left, I was able to recall great heaps of it, and use that memory as evidence that North Carolina was, at best, a third-rate...
If I'm walking down an American street and anyone darker than a peanut shell approaches, I'll say, Hello. This because, if I don't say it, he or she might think that I'm anxious. Which, of course, I m...
Showing 261 to 280 of 710 results