In elementary school, mine was not the party-pack lunch—the lunch you see in TV commercials that explodes with all sorts of crazy lunch fun. Kids in those commercials fall all over themselves in great pitches of joy over the party-in-a-lunch-box mom packed. Those little logs of cheese, that cup of O-shaped spaghetti, the bologna on white bread wonderfulness—so much lunching good times that, once unpacked, unleash storms and storms of fun. Just not for me. [Read more...]
Rachel, me, and my Dr Scholl’s on our deck in Virginia, 1975.
When I was little, my excitement for summer had a little to do with lazy television days, pool parties, and watching Matthew Carrier play little league baseball, and a lot to do with getting a new pair of Dr. Scholl’s “Original Exercise Sandals.” I anticipated my new pair as soon as the winter icicles started to melt. Months were spent deliberating which color to get. Back then, the choices were red, blue, black, and white, but I agonized long hours about which would be the perfect color for that summer. I could get only one pair and took very seriously the four month color commitment. Each year I’d resolve to try a bold red or blue, but I always wound up choosing unassuming white. [Read more...]
East Berlin street behind my apartment house, 1976.
Lupe lived on the 8th floor of Leipzigerstrasse 60 in East Berlin. It was 1976 and back then, Leipzigerstrasse was a lonely boulevard with few shops and sparse trees. There were hundreds just like it all around the city—once-alive avenues that had turned into ghosts when the wall went up. Along these streets, between grand buildings, were gaping holes, like cavities, where bombs had dropped in 1945 and nothing had been filled in since. Old churches lay crumbling, weeds crawled across sidewalks from empty lots, and weary Party slogans rattled in the wind against the facades of boarded-up factories. If you took out a paint box, mixed blue, gray, and brown into a gloomy cloud, that was the color of East Berlin. The city was dull and dusty, smelling of diesel and wet cement. [Read more...]