Retirement: Phase II
At age seventy and after thirty-six years of marriage, I am in a new relationship. He’s seventy-three, tall, lean, intelligent, curious, and kind. He’s got boyish charm, and when he laughs, his blue eyes sparkle. We share a love of good food and wine; we enjoy the theater, dance, jazz, college basketball, chamber music, and movies. We’re solitary types, readers, and we can be quiet together. My new love is my old husband, Weldon, and since his retirement four years ago, we’ve been redefining our relationship. It hasn’t been easy, and the challenge took me by surprise. When Weldon...
Read MoreNymph in the Bathtub
The photo jumps out at me from the pile of vintage photos that wind a trail back through my family on my mother’s side. I recognize the image and the person in it. I’ve seen another copy of the photo, framed, hanging on the walls of two different bathrooms in two of the houses my mother has lived in over the past ten years. I know the black-and-white toddler is Mom. She’s standing naked in a bathtub with her backside to the camera. Her head is turned to the right and slightly cocked over her shoulder. She wipes the edge of the tub with a rag. It looks like all the water has been...
Read MoreSuperior Dairy
My stomach churned as I dressed to take Dad on our first lunch date in decades. For our outing today, he had groomed as carefully as a suitor. He’d taken his weekly shower, shaved, and put on a clean chambray shirt. His collar yawned around his neck, and the skin below his cuffs was papery as corn husks. Bracing his elbow so he wouldn’t stumble on the buckled sidewalk, I heaved open the thick glass door, and my father stuttered into Superior Dairy on his wooden cane. The place wasn’t really preserved as a 1950s-style diner — they simply had never remodeled. The booths and bar stools...
Read MoreMy First Snow
When I saw snow falling from the sky, for the first time in my life, I was thirty-two years old and was studying in Purdue University. I had lived in the flatlands of Punjab, India, where it never snowed. While growing up, I read about snow in books and wondered how it felt to have flakes of snow falling on your head. We do have snow on the Himalayan Mountains, but they’re far away from where I grew up. When I was twenty and working as an engineer in New Delhi, my friend, Mohan, was posted in Simla Hills, where they had frequent snow falls.This hill station, which served as the summer...
Read MoreThe Art of Goodbye
The house is empty again. Empty, but not quiet, because my 13-year-old son has left the radio on in his bedroom and his Pandora station playing in the office. I can hear both from where I stand by the front door, a cacophony of nonsensical sound. With my hand still on the doorknob, I catch one last glimpse of him in the passenger seat as the car pulls out of the driveway, his wild curls reminding me he’s overdue for a haircut. I wave, even though he’s looking the other way, then turn to survey the mess left behind in his wake. Books and games and toys on the...
Read MoreLife in the Movies
I’ve been catching up on movies lately, and found myself thinking about how much simpler everyday life would be if it followed movie rules. For one thing, it would be more convenient: in the movies, everyone speaks English. It doesn’t matter what area or era, though with older settings like ancient Greece or Rome, speech is usually delivered — strangely enough — in a British accent. If it’s a question of British English speakers versus American English speakers, then the British-speaking person is invariably either a boor, or evil. And if someone speaks in a non-English language,...
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