Not too long ago, my sister and I were discussing her workout habits via e-mail. She confessed to having fainted once from dehydration, while I admonished her about drinking more water, and then somehow the discussion turned to perspiration. Every time she comes out of the gym all sweaty glowing with perspiration, she thinks back to the time we took ballet class together. Now see here. When I was eight years old, my mother asked me if I wanted to…
Football season has started, and so has the school year. *sigh* Back when I was in middle school, the year in phys. ed. would begin with flag football. Our P.E. class was coed, so it seemed ideal—no tackling, no injuries, no worries. The girls never had to fear being dragged across the field trying to stop a male receiver from making a touchdown; all we had to do was pull a flag from the receiver’s waist, and it was equivalent…
I miss having a piano around. I haven’t touched a keyboard in years. My first piano was an old thing, bought used—quite likely twice or three times over. It was a mahogany-hued upright piano with a godawful amber-colored plastic covering that looked like cheap decorative glass. I remember pieces of that plastic monstrosity falling off as we drove home with the piano riding in a U-Haul trailer behind us. There I was, nine years old, looking out the back window…
The first time I ever got into a physical fight, I was six years old. My cousin Anthony and I were playing in the yard behind his apartment building, where we found an old stroller left for the trash. We decided to use the stroller as a toy wagon, and with Anthony being two years younger than me, I had him sit in it as I pushed him around on the paved walkways. During our innocent play, my cousin’s neighbor…
For the first 20 years of my life, I’ve had a certain relationship with boys. I was either really good, close friends with them, or I would have hopeless crushes on them from afar—and never the twain ever met. That was about the extent of my relationship with the opposite sex. In the “close friend” categorization, there was my cousin Anthony, my cousin’s godbrother Eugene, the nameless boy with my last name in preschool class, Daman, and a few others…