This many years ago in my mother’s belly, her pushed against the window worried about my father who defied curfew in Havana and went out to “get food” – “check on my grandfather’s stores” – “see what was going on” (the story changes every time it is told) – my mother, eight months plus pregnant pushed up against the window trying to see the 14 year old soldiers “smacking their chewing gum,” “carrying rifles,” coming…
My lips are being bit daily – giving them a nice plumpness – and everything I have to say right now I’m saying to one person who is making me very very very happy.
It’s been one week since my “date” and obviously a lot of change has occurred around the LaLa, like there is someone else here when I wake up in the morning and when I go to sleep at night – which is strange and beautiful – we walked Loca and Lucky in the park this morning and T could not help but notice the lush beauty that surrounds us here – the park with the…
The way Americans can be held up to the glaring light of the world tribunal – guns – again it is guns. NIU, our sympathetic sister campus – we have so many of our people at my company who came from there and yet someone took everyone’s confidence away yesterday by sneaking from behind a black curtain and destroying the lives of so many people, not just the ones he killed, but the ones he…
You could choose to think of Valentine’s day as a farce – as some silly Hallmark gesture to get you to purchase greeting cards – but then you’d have to believe that Mardi Gras is ridiculous and catching beads and wearing costumes are garish customs, and that delivering flowers to a loved one is superficial and unimaginative, and you’d really have to be willing to let go of a lot of conventional rituals such as…
Fatma came by late in the day to have cay and as we sat catching up and planning grand trips to everywhere – a woman drove up in an SUV, opened the door and tossed appeared to toss a bulldog out into the street. The bulldog stood in the middle of the street disoriented, then stumbled over to the sidewalk and was running into things. Fatma and I ran out and thought the dog was…
Here’s what I know for a fact today: when you meet the person you could fall in love with, you’ll know it – there won’t be any doubt. Whatever you do will be the right thing to do. I say this because everyone agonizes about every little thing they should do when they meet someone with potential – and as Gomez said a while back, it doesn’t matter what you do, if the other person…
I truly feel now that I am being followed by a moonshadow – some force so positive and lovely that I’m being caressed by its tendrils as it floats me along in the ether. Ivette sends me this after I tell her how I am feeling – how la muneca makes me walk inches off the ground:
There have been email volleys circulating around the neighborhood forum about a female mallard found strangled by a plastic grocery bag and the male mallard who has sat watch over her. One writes, “mallards mate for life” – and others lament “humans destroying nature” – and still others bemoan the “careless act of littering and destroying our quality of life.” Writing about loss, about longing, about tragedy and betrayal drips off our pens … while writing…