Insane Earthlings

Hillary Clinton suffered a disadvantage over the last several months. It’s an advantage that Barack Obama enjoyed during both of his Presidential campaigns. My mother was here, on this earth, voicing her advocacy for her candidate. If you ever met my mother, you would know that having her in your corner was a competitive advantage that belied her petite stature. By this point my mother would have already voted. But had she been here among us who are still confined to this realm, she would have been spending the last several months reminding everyone how important it is to elect Hillary Clinton. My mother was not a partisan loyalist. She always voted for the candidate that she felt was the nicest, had the best policies for families, and acted in a dignified manner.   And she was not always vocal about her choices. But as she grew older, and her family grew to include grandchildren and great-grandchildren, she began to speak out for the candidates she believed would help shape a...

The assignment from my first day of Freshman Composition was so easy I couldn’t believe it. Ha! This was college? I thought college was supposed to be difficult. The teacher had said to write a paragraph. Paragraphs were my strength. Just write five or six sentences, throw in some big words, and maybe even get fancy with some poetic devices, instant B+. And even more unbelievable she had said we could write about any topic. In high school I had to fight tooth and nail with my teacher for her to allow me to write my research paper on American poets about Jim Morrison.   I was so excited. College was way better than high school. I went back to my room and quickly dispatched with scrawling out several sentences comparing eighties heavy metal to protest songs from the sixties. I was writing about Rock and Roll and the professor was going to be blown away. Hell, since I would turn it in on time, it would be an easy A! I eagerly delivered it to her mailbox. Everyone had al...

Glassy. That’s the kind of water we wanted to ski on. My friends and I were teenagers and lived on a lake with miles of shoreline. Hundreds of long fingers of water that led to other fingers. We could wait until the weekenders had winched their boats onto trailers and headed back to the city. The choppiness of the water created by the criss-crossing wakes of frenzied part-time boaters would dissipate faster than you might think. The lake was soothing and healing itself just as we would cut a seam straight down its middle. The best coves were hidden deep into long channels and around a bend, invisible behind thick tree lines that covered the shoreline. The mirror-like surface would come into view. We throttled back, killed the engine, and drifted. I absorbed the quiet. The perfect surface tension resembled solid ice. On top of the water, the ski made a skittering sound across the white water being churned by the propeller. The wake opened into a V shape on either side. I ...