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Unbelieving
I was about six the first time it dawned on me to ask my fifteen-year-old brother who the man on a stick he wore so conspicuously around his neck was. This was before the phrase “personal savior” had entered the public lexicon, so he explained to me the long way around that Jesus was a…
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Charlottesville
About this time last year I was wrestling with, in the words I used at the time, “why the message of tolerance still isn’t getting through to some people who might be receptive of it, and what those of us who believe in it can do to proselytize better.” What a difference a year makes.…
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A Day for Eating the Poisonous Mushrooms
Today is a day for eating the poisonous mushrooms. A day for climbing the pole and finding out how high the voltage is. For flying above the storm and stepping out onto the clouds, For standing at Zion’s edge and answering vertigo’s call. This is the world? Two years strapped in a padded cell. Glimpses…
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Doing the Math
Once upon a time I was a software developer. Somewhere along the way I gave it up to pursue a passion for writing and a quieter life. But if you ask me now what I do, and if I were to answer honestly, I’d have to say, “I am the administrator of my mother’s death. And…
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What I Hate
This is a thing that has been making the rounds on Facebook among some people that I know: The Democrat [sic] Party is the world’s most successful hate group. It attracts poor people who hate rich people, black people who hate white people, gay people who hate straight people, feminists who hate men, environmentalists who hate the internal…
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Some Random Thoughts at the Beginning of the New Year
– I am snug in an ocean side room near Cambria. The rain that had been slanting sideways has dwindled to little more than a drizzle, and though the sea and the sky meet in a soft, unbroken expanse the seagulls are emerging from their huddles onshore and drifting past to remind me that I…
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Egon
The first time I met Egon a tree had fallen across the dirt road leading to our house. My then-coworker-and-eventual-husband and I had taken the financially daring plunge of renting a place on a couple of acres in semi-rural Atascadero – me because I was tired of neighbors, him because he wanted a dog. The…
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How Phyllis Schlafly Made Me a Feminist
During my very brief stint just out of high school as an evangelical Christian, I tried with the committed desperation of the newly converted to coax my parents to church so they too could receive the Good News Of Jesus Christ. My father was immovable. My mother, who for years had attended seven a.m. Mass…
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In the City
When Waze blandly informed us that it was twenty-five minutes to our hotel four miles away, I knew that we’d arrived. My husband and I had been talking about taking a trip to San Francisco for years – both when we lived across the bay in Marin and when we moved back southward – but…
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Mother’s Days
It is the twenty-second of April, and this will be my mother’s fourth hospitalization since the sixteenth of February, trapped in a deadly cycle of infections acquired, beaten back, acquired again. I text my brother and call Stacey, a friend of my brother’s and a private caregiver who for over two years has dedicated herself…
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