My siblings and I had stumbled down the walk hauling our pillows and blankets to the waiting car… the three of us piled into the backseat and tried to recapture the comfort of our beds.
My father was an actor who was known for playing outlaws. The ladies loved him, and he had left my mother for one of them. Stan was a balding businessman … who acted, well, like a businessman.
My father never had a driver’s license during my lifetime. Family photos showing him behind the wheel of a 1950 Buick sedan proved he must have been a driver before I was born. I’d once asked my mother why he gave it up.
When we bought the Blazer, it was a kind of joke…Caught between city lives we loved and the country lives we’d been born into, we were torn between being the sort of people who owned a vehicle like that and people who scorned people who owned a vehicle like that.
It’s a gray December afternoon. There’s dirty forgotten snow on the ground and a warning of rain in the air. It’s the Sunday before Christmas, and I’m going to a holiday party.
I don’t remember any of the rides we caught that day between the time we got our jaywalking tickets and the time we were standing on I-80 at one of the Lake Tahoe interchanges.
JAWS. I clutched my stomach as though the word itself had taken a bite out of me. My father planned to take us to see the actual Jaws, the shark that terrorized a nation.
Travel-weary and craving the mystical, we asked the ranger about this quiet area, south of the more popular Grand Canyon. Were there any good hikes nearby?
Getting from Tbilisi to the lowland Gurian town of Chokhatauri is easy, just a matter of taking our lives in our sweating hands on the pot-holed two-lane east-west national highway…
… my houseplant has been through a lot. It’s a seven-year-old jade, and it’s never lived in any house longer than five months before having to move again.