Category: memoir
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Memoir: A summer job (1981)
So much great culture was happening for me in 1981. My high points: But my memoir prompt–to describe a summer job in 500-ish words–limits me. So as I was enjoying the culture above referenced, here’s my chapter: I was 20 years old the summer of 1981, living rent-free with dad in his two-bedroom apartment off…
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Memoir: One day in 1975
When South Oak Park’s David Bowie passes us on the school playground, my friends smile and shake their heads in judgment. “Would you get a look at that fag? He’s wearing his mom’s makeup!”
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Memoir: Goodbye, old friend (1982-98)
Dear Mes, I wasn’t at your side in 1998 when you crossed the “rainbow bridge” to your afterlife, which I suppose holds endless green meadows teeming with flocks of pliant sheep that you direct and protect for eternity. You had your father’s shepherd heart, and you shepherded me and my growing family through my young…
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Memoir: first experiences with Punk (1976)
Last Saturday, as authoritarians in charge continued steering society over the guardrails and into the ditch of savagery and greed, the 20th annual Riotfest took place in Douglass Park, Chicago. The three-day festival features musical acts inspired by and spawned during the Punk rock era, when I was a youngster. It celebrates an attitude of…
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Memoir: Safe spaces (animist edition) (2023)
Is it a coincidence that when there was nothing but lawn about those beds, we were sorely preyed on?
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Memoir: Every song that mattered to you can tell a story (1971)
“Yes,” I could say, “my family life might be shameful, but I know who bats third for the Cubs (Joe Pepitone) and who guested on the Flip Wilson Show last week (Bill Cosby, Gina Lollabrigita, and John Sebastian).”
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Memoir: a lunchtime intervention (1972-73)
By year two of our lunches, I’d become conversant with the riches of the district’s media collection accessed through her authority: endless filmstrips and 16mm history and science films.
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Memoir: a road not taken (1968-72)
My first physical fight with another male occurs shortly after we move to 1022 S. Scoville. I was five years old. In the backyard, under the cherry tree, one of my soon-to-be playmates, a couple of years older than I, had somehow provoked me. We fell to pushing and grappling, and pretty soon he got…
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Memoir: My father’s gift and my son’s (1971/2025)
My son and his wife don’t exchange gifts. They think that love expressed in material forms merely creates more clutter in a surfeited world. They might also tell you that the day-to-day “gifts” of mutual respect, service, and sacrifice are the only true tokens of a loving partnership. Not I. I was programmed by post-war…
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Memoir: Some education things I left behind (1994-2021)
My friend Laura, who still teaches at the school where I served the last 27 years of my career, texted. She wanted to know if I’d be interested in the $30/hour job of supervising exams. Test administration was the worst part of my job, the part called “summative assessment” that really meant “Son we’re gonna…
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