Girlhood

We were riding the bus to St. Paul on a Sunday afternoon, Tracy and I, headed to some festival on Harriet Island. We unfolded a map and held it in the sunlight to figure out our stop.

This is when the girl noticed us. She was sitting up front, just behind the driver, holding tightly to a handrail. Her eyes were wide but tired, and rimmed with smudged mascara. She wore a black-and-white dress with ruffles, an unsuccessful attempt to appear sophisticated.

“Can, can you help me?” she asked.

50/50… but not for 50 million

Wouldn’t the bureaucratic nightmare of US health care — HMOs, voicemail labyrinths, hieroglyphic invoices, encyclopedia-sized user’s manuals, government assistance and lack thereof, contradicting and often cruel decisions — be a gold mine for dark comedy? A comedy could be just the sugar-coated pill the doctor ordered…

Free skate

My father is slightly nervous, slightly timid, and just plain slight. He is caution, planning, deliberation, care, hesitance. This is how he has been as long as I can remember. This is Dad. But today, our small family went to the ice rink. My mother, brother and I laced up the endless hooks on our skates, pulling the laces tight, losing the grip, re-pulling. We looked up and Dad was gone. His shoes lay next to ours, unsecured…