Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Tag: memoir
Straight with Many Limes
Flor de Cana is Nicaraguan rum. I’m not a connoisseur of rum. I only drink this rum. Because it is Nicaraguan. I remember being in Managua, sitting in the courtyard of Casa Bolonia, a squat, sprawling hotel where plywood had been used to make…
Head Spinning
A few nights ago, I searched for old boyfriends on social media. I found one from when I was 19. When I met him, he was a few years older than me, had just returned from Vietnam, and had his jaw wired shut as…
Rings
[I’m taking an online flash nonfiction class. First assignment this week: 10 minutes on the prompt: The telephone rang.] The telephone rang but I didn’t answer it. I thought I knew who was calling but figured I’d only know if the phone rang again….
The Fall
I fell. I fell on a boat ramp that had jagged rows of bumpy concrete intended to prevent falling. I gripped the end of the kayak in my right hand, faced up the ramp like I had done so often before, and waited for…
One Bird Two Wires
She sat across the conference table from me, an unintended meeting nearly forty years in the making. She was an old boyfriend’s other love interest, the woman he was with when he wasn’t with me which was often because we fought. He went on…
Book Smarts
My friend Karen is reading How Democracies Die. She told me this in the locker room after our swim and shower. It was so like her to be toweling off, her skin red from the world’s hottest shower, and talking about the slippery slop…
Graveside
We sat in folding chairs My father who had forgotten me My forgiven self next to him The minister closing her Bible Looking at us, waiting with us Earth, lush and dark and waiting Loamy, asking to be held Then soft tapping on my…
Dumbfounded
What if all your hard times were a long ago? What if your scars and shames are folded in the drawer? What if you worry a hatchet is lying in wait? How would you change your day? Would you find new clues to catastrophe? Would you…
Two a Day #3: Two Days Married
It was a little bumpy at the beginning, well, intermittently for a while, but eventually ours became a terrific marriage. There is something to the adage “give it time.” We have – it’ll be 32 years on February 28th. This is a story about…
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect.
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
