Yatsufusa
1998? – September 10, 2014
You mattered more to me than most humans.
ByGD
Routine Business
I don’t remember when I first realized that the word “routine” didn’t have a negative connotation for most people. But I know it must have been a shock. I grew up with a mother who never drove home the same way twice because “who knows what you might discover down a different street?” In our house “routine” was a little bit of a dirty word; it was something necessary but distasteful, like poop or taxes. I can remember her tone as she would groan, “Back to the routine,” at the end of every school vacation.
ByGD
A New Hope
When I was a kid, I loved the beginning of the school year. At first I believed that I was about to be initiated in the orders of the learned. Even in later years when the anticipation of great knowledge was reduced to the lowest common denominator of cafeteria food and lonely recesses, the dropping temperature and falling leaves of early September that heralded a new school year filled me with anticipation. Read More
ByGD
Skin Deep
“Oh, yes, hi, I think we met before.” The attractive Icelandic man was so tall he had to bend down just to shake my hand. Self-consciously, I saw his eyes dart to my mouth and away. He was trying not to stare at the giant blister that had spread in glistening, pus-filled mounds across my face, leaving crusty yellow scabs behind as it traveled from the center of my bottom lip to my left cheek.
I met him at a different music festival two years earlier; I had a blister then, too, and I wondered if the blister was how he had recognized me. It occurred to me that many of the Icelanders I have met more than once have never since me with a healthy face. There might be quite a few people in this country who don’t know that fever blisters (or cold sores) are a common side effect of air travel, jet lag, and stress, and who think of me as “that poor American girl with the deformed face.”
And then I wondered, Is this how my daughter feels all the time?
ByGD
In Memoriam: Oscar
Oscar was built like a tank and smelled so rank you knew when he entered the room. A row of welts rose on your skin wherever he touched your face. At the end of a week, I couldn’t let him go. Read More