Essays

No wheels, no license, no ability to drive – I'm a little hesitant, a little ashamed.

As I turn 38 and keep stocking drawers full of dreams and half-completed projects, I’m pushing forward with one big initiative: I’m having an imaginary baby. Why not?

My grandfather’s name was Efthimios Vasilios Patouhas, but I called him Papa. As a toddler I could only manage to spurt out the first syllable of the Greek word for grandfather, pappou. The repeated pa, pa, pa eventually became Papa.

As I turn 38 and keep stocking drawers full of dreams and half-completed projects, I’m pushing forward with one big initiative: I’m having an imaginary baby. Why not?

People were huddled in their offices, whispering. They glanced up with intense faces, returned to private conversation.

This is it, I knew. It’s happening today

His  periwinkle  shoes  have  a  texture that  suggests  the  skin  of  a  reptile.

Seven a.m. on a Monday morning and my mother is the only one awake. She pads downstairs. In the kitchen, she raises the shades, letting in weak, gray daylight, then turns to find the coffee pot.

Twenty years ago I was famous. Not so famous that my torrid affairs with young starlets were covered by national magazines, and being thirteen at the time, that wasn’t really much of a problem. I was famous enough that strangers followed me around the Montgomery Mall when I went shopping.

I hate my job. As evening supervisor of a one-hundred bed nursing
home, I oversee the work of one other nurse and ten nurses’ aides.