100 words (minimum)

Dog

hapappas — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:41:02 +0000

My childhood dog was a black and white mutt (half spaniel, half collie) named Princess. I am embarrassed to report that, in the family meeting devoted to naming her—the only family meeting I can remember–, I was the one to suggest this unfortunate name, evoking images of poodles dressed in pink tutus. She grew to be a gentle dog, whose only crimes were her daily visits to the elementary school through the woods to raid the trash cans for discarded school lunches and, once, a leap onto the picnic table to grab up an unattended stick of butter.

Potatoes

hapappas — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 15:24:32 +0000

As oldest kid in the family it was my job to go down into the basement to fetch things. At Christmas time at my grandmother’s house that meant edging down her steep stairs, leaving behind the light and music and laughter of my aunts and cousins, to fill a plate of cookies for Christmas Eve smorgasbord. At home, later in the winter, it meant going down to the musty cold cellar, stepping around the rotting butternut squash, and reaching sightlessly into the tall brown bag of potatoes, hoping to grab a handful that hadn’t yet sprouted those creepy white eyes.

Kings

hapappas — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 02:55:05 +0000

Before one of us threw the board and pieces across the room—I can’t remember who it was and whether it was anger at losing or protest over cheating—my brother and I would play chess. We had learned how to move the pieces from the red paperback Hoyle’s Book of Games we’d found at the top of bookcase one boring afternoon. We moved quickly through the first part, pawns dashing across the open field, falling to the left and right. Supposedly the most powerful, the kings never moved until the end, pivoting in terror, one step at a time.

Cell phone

hapappas — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 02:53:39 +0000

My daughter carries it from room to room, ears alert always for the whirr or chirp that links her to friends sometimes, to boyfriend mostly. The pipeline is always open. She reaches for the cell phone, flips it open, reads the message that’s always important. She’s here but not here as she taps a reply. I listen to the rhythm, fast and desperate to my ear. A minute’s conversation takes fifteen to text, telegraphed emotion, voice evaporated to leave square letters. Hidden in the closet are two years’ worth of letters, twenty years old, that her father wrote to me.

Toy

hapappas — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:41:18 +0000

In the basement I played with my fairy tale blocks, six different stories glued, imperfectly, to the faces of the sixteen cubes: the prince sliding the slipper onto Cinderella’s foot, Red Hiding Hood strolling through the woods. One picture completed, I flipped each block to its right side, to see if a second picture would magically appear. Next, turning engineer, I would lay out five blocks, spaced a thumbs’ width apart, then set out four on top, to bridge each gap, then three, then two, then one. The satisfaction of symmetry was a glowing and comfortable pressure in my chest.