Tag: alcoholism
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Memoir: A summer job (1981)
So much great culture was happening for me in 1981. My high points: Starting Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)–this book challenged my powers of attention and my notions of what a novel could do. I took a year to finish it. Seeing My Dinner With André–a film that both of my parents (divorced) enjoyed with me. Great…
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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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Review: Kimberly Akimbo (June 2025 at CIBC Theater, Chicago)
There is plenty of darkness in Kimberly’s world. Her very birth was traumatic for her parents, neither of whom has coped well with having produced “faulty” offspring.
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Memoir: A thought experiment concerning Dad (1973-80)
How would my father be doing if he were alive and well today, if he hadn’t died at 59 of bowel cancer? I think Dad might have adapted pretty well to the current culture. Several times, I saw him accommodate powerful changes in mores that happened around him in the 1970s. A professional adaptation occurred…
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Memoir: back to school again, but different (2024)
It’s “back to school time,” late September, and I feel nostalgia for all those autumns I bravely buckled up, put on the uniform, bid farewell to summer leisure reading and reconciled myself to another year of Education-ese. All teachers understood the calendar: in August or September, get your s-word together. You’re working for the school…
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Memoir: Big surprise (2022-23)
In the fall of 2022, about a year after I retired, I decided to disrupt my relationship with alcohol. Drinking had become automatic and was no longer working for me. My doctor threatened blood pressure meds if I couldn’t lower my hypertension, and cholesterol pills if I couldn’t improve my blood quality. So I decided…
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Memoir: unsung hero Sharon (1971-72)
In 1971 and 72, when mom is bodily present between stints in psych wards, she disappears for days in deep chemical fogs inside her bedroom, inaccessible to us kids. Into the motherless void steps fifteen-year-old Sharon, who becomes a loving presence for her younger siblings, Sheila, Sarah, and me. It is Sharon who in mom’s…
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Memoir: Mother (1961-71)
Oblivious to the presence of my sisters, my mother sighs wistfully to me. She recounts how, with each of her previous three pregnancies, her goal of a male baby had been cruelly deferred. But as a Christian woman, she kept faithfully praying and then–this blessed night at West Suburban Hospital when the nurse handed her…
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Memoir: Ten-year-old me is afraid… (1971-72)
Ten-year-old me is afraid… …that even though I have asked the Lord Jesus Christ to be my personal saviour, there is always a chance that it hasn’t worked, and I will be thrown into the Lake of Fire with all the other sinners. Then, when the Rapture happens I will have to live through seven…
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Memoir: Mom’s racist heritage (1990)
When I was 12, Mom had been pretty incapacitated for the last decade. We younger kids didn’t learn her prejudices until she got sober, her personality melting out of a frozen block of vodka. Turns out, she harbored some downright racist ideas. She held un-generous feelings towards African-Americans, sorting them all into two camps–the uneducated,…
