chaplain and librarian
No church wants a pastor without a wife. Not in the 1960s anyway. The year after I graduated with a Masters in Theology, my father visited my school’s library and placed a book on each study table. He made plans to return later, see who caught his fancy and then join him at his table as he claimed his book. But it was the student librarian who smiled at him when he returned. She despised patriarchy, loved to gossip and preferred jokes to sanity. My father asked her, and my mother said yes. , Sari Fordham
new bloom expected
This can’t possibly work. Hemza is half my age and lives 3,800 miles away. But after meeting me in November, he updated his online status to say, “I fell in love with his soul before I could touch his skin.” With distance and age difference, it can’t go anywhere, right? Still, I keep hearing “love,” “skin” and “soul” in a sentence that I’m pretty sure refers to me. When Hemza arrived, he planted 100 tulip bulbs in my yard, so I’ll be thinking about him in the spring. So it’s probably going somewhere, isn’t it? , Matthew Lukasiak
candlelight coloring
Sometimes the electricity would go off, sometimes the water, often both. When I was growing up in Los Angeles, my family kept a cooler in our hallway that we filled with food and ice. My parents fought a lot during those nights. Usually, my brothers moved in with my father, while I stayed with my mother. We would color by candlelight in coloring books at the Dollar Store and watch reruns of “Roseanne” on battery-operated TVs. My mother remembers those nights as “the bad times”. For me, those were the moments that made my mother my best friend. , samantha lopez
a ride home
After my father died, I went to New York to spend a week fixing up his house. Every day, I filled the boxes with his books, with each shelf my heart emptier. Every night, I cried myself to sleep in his bed. I felt torn between wanting to return home and wanting to be with him. I arrived back at the Detroit airport in a quandary, knowing my husband would be at work; My grief and I have to go home. But then my phone started ringing with a message from my husband: “Be there at 5.” , debbie feet