I wake up sweating and lie there as the adrenaline ebbs, running through what I would take, if I had to leave. The mental cataloging starts: what I have lost already; what I have yet to lose; an inventory of what matters.
The first sound is the foot sound, the break sound, the cracking crunch that hikers know… It is a stubborn, short sound, underneath your boots. Ka-krack, krunch, it says. It says little else.
The bat is so itty-bitty-teeny-tiny her body embraces only half my thumb, to which she clings during our first moments. Clings to with eyes shut: either because she naturally re-immersed herself in torpor, or from exhaustion.
In the first moments of Saturday, Aug. 12, 1995, in Shreveport, Louisiana, my older brother, Russell, age 42, was finishing up his shift as a minimum-wage, 54-hour-a-week stock clerk at Thrifty Liquor.
I never knew what to say when people asked me what my father did for a living. Sometimes I joked, “He’s involved with high-risk investments.” — “Stocks? Bonds?” — “More like ponies and dice.”
He held it up and out, away from his body and along his arm. He used it to point at us sitting there in front of him. Over the curved edge, he gathered us in his sights.
“Our intent is to create a family cabin—a retreat to remain in the family for generations.” And that is precisely what Spike Carlsen and his wife, Kat, have done, along with their five children.
Tim Kenny has a tendency to end up in faraway places, particularly those on the edge of political or social change.
His memoir, Home Is Burning, about [Marshall] and his siblings caring for their dad while he battled it out with Lou Gehrig’s disease and their mom with cancer, is nitty gritty reality at its harshest, complete with poop scenes.
Jennifer Hayden’s The Story of My Tits is an experience. At its base, this graphic memoir is exactly what it claims to be—an account of the rise and fall of a woman’s breasts.
