People you know & people who know people you know. learn more
By Alice Feller
I was twenty years old when I took up smoking, fully planning to become addicted. In my future life as a social worker I saw myself ministering to heroin addicts. To truly understand what they were facing, I thought, I should experience addiction for myself. Nothing prolonged, just a quick in and out. Also, I wanted to lose ten pounds.
By Karen Hunt
The day after the bloody siege on the Capitol, I dug out an 8 x 12 black and white glossy of a bunch of teenagers standing on its steps. There’s me and forty-six classmates posing with our Congressman, John B. Anderson (who would later run for president as an Independent). We’d just graduated a few days before, the Hanover High School class of 1966. For three days we’d been packed on a bus, traveling from our little town in Illinois, stopping along the way to tour Gettysburg.
By Barbara Ridley
I come home exhausted, good for nothing except collapsing onto the couch and spacing out, barely able to absorb the TV news. My dear wife hands me a glass of wine and returns to the kitchen to prepare dinner. After eating and briefly catching up on my email, I’m ready for an early night. I can’t imagine returning the next morning, up at dawn for another 9-hour shift, but thankfully, I don’t have to. I have a week to recover.
By
I have been so defined by those who were important and then their disappearance, vanished from my life because no reason was given for their coming, or going. I am writing of childhood, of course, and a damaged habit that then persisted without my noticing, a habit of not asking who that was, how they appeared or disappeared or why. My landscape is littered with disappearing parents, a brother who vanished for 20 years and died homeless, a great aunt who lived secretly 20 years in hospital, a relative who became a Carmelite nun, others whose histories or absences were mentioned only in proverbial hushed tones. So it is in certain families.
By Peggy Phillips
My world has become so small. On a regular basis, I see only my husband as we share the same living space. Occasionally, I see a neighbor outside from a window, or wave to one from across the street. We might shout a greeting, “How are you doing over there?”, but that’s about it. There is no way to have a real conversation while trying to maintain a distance of six feet between people. Our social lives have become “screen time”, zoom calls replacing big noisy family dinners, FaceTime instead of morning coffee with a friend, but I’ve found nothing to replace the warm neck squeezes and soft cuddles that I miss from my grandchildren. I walk often, and we walk together sometimes, my husband and I, but with so much together time we both seem to enjoy our walks alone a little better. The parks and recreation areas are closed, so we are limited to our neighborhood. Lovely houses to look at, trees, gardens and flowers, spring is beautiful and in full bloom, but there are no hikes in the bright green, mustard-covered hills or through the redwoods on a path dappled with sunlight that both soothe and refresh my soul.
By Pat Gallagher
“I vont to be alone”, Swedish-born film star Greta Garbo is reputed to have said. It’s all I remember of her. Never saw any of her films; didn’t understand the mystique surrounding her. I thought she was odd. Did she marry? Have a lover? Have children? I’d no idea, but her desire to be alone seemed an aberration. I was young then. It would be a long time before I understood.
By Daniel Danzig
We walk past or around homeless persons every day on the sidewalks of Oakland and San Francisco. Along our city streets and through freeway underpasses we carefully drive past ramshackle homeless encampments. Some of my images are made from the perspective of a casual passerby. Those photographs show people sleeping or lying on the street under blankets, newspapers, or nothing at all. They are anonymous, faceless, not so much people, as “a social issue.” Other photographs are made from the perspective of a seeker. Those images (and conversations) attempt at understanding and a desire to see those who are without homes (or adequate food, clothing, health care, or employment) as persons possessing innate human dignity, with hopes and dreams, not unlike that casual passerby or more importantly, the photographer himself. Click on images to enlarge.
By Barbara Ridley
My social media feeds were full of calls to “Boycott Alabama!” “Leave!” “Never go there!” Andy Borowitz, one of my favorite political humorists, posted: “Americans given new reason never to go to Alabama.” I saw lots of Likes and Ha-Ha emojis. And then disparaging comments along the lines of: “Stop writing insults about Alabama; they’re 50th in education. They can’t read that shit.” More ha-ha’s.
By Pat Gallagher
I think this morning, after I check the headlines and start the laundry, I’ll get going on a couple of pieces of writing I have in mind. Exploratory things. One, an account of my year in Walthamstow, East London over 40 years ago; a year of robust immigration to the UK of British Subjects from India and Pakistan. I was living in Manor Park, E. 12, and teaching reading in a primary school in E. 17. The idea for this piece was sparked by a news story I’d recently read about the arrest of several putative airplane bomb plotters from Walthamstow . I think I’ll see if I have anything to say about that so I begin:
By Anna Brown
“Did you always want to be a teacher, Ms. Brown?” they ask me.