Month: September 2011

Fancy Packing

I forgot to tell you something about my mother. She’s the one who mailed Dad’s engagement ring to me uninsured “because I didn’t like the looks of the woman at the post office.” She hadn’t wanted the agent to know something valuable was inside the box. Whenever I go East, I try to pack up an item or two that had been given to me earlier by my mother or father. For my siblings it’s […]

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Call Me Tinna

Tinna was my imaginary friend, captured on audio tape by my father in the 1950s. “Ginna’s a good girl. Tinna’s a bad girl.” On the bus coming home from work this week, the sun knifed into the south-facing windows. A teenaged boy with a severe visual impairment sat in the row in front of me with his parents. I heard him complain, “The sun’s so loud. So bright in my ears.”

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