It's ten years since the last time and I've gone back to school, so Rodney and his beloved fish-out-of-water-in-college slapstick classic looms large, but I'm just not ready for him yet. Although I worked as a writer and editor for the past decade, I've never had a writing class, so I joke that I'm finally going to learn how to write, which kills my friends, but sails past my new co-students.
Afternoon sun pours in through the skylights, refracting off particles of magic that hang in the air like mist along the Northern California Coast. Amy has just arrived.
“Ready for my volunteer shift,” she announces. Amy approaches me with a slight limp and unsteady gait, remnants of the car accident that inflicted her childhood with traumatic brain injury. Sandy brown waves frame her round face, her blue-gray eyes dancing like saucers – one drifts slightly towards the heavens, the other pierces my soul. Like me, she is an East Coast transplant, and our playful, sarcastic banter connects us to a sense of home. She’s happy to be here. I’m happy to see her.
benefited from perhaps the greatest confluence of talent and bleeding edge technology ever assembled. This massive team managed to put Neil Armstrong on the moon, but it still had to wrestle with that great enemy of all explorers— the unknown. Despite the most comprehensive and arduous testing possible, there could be no guarantees.
For almost an hour we’d been hypnotized by the kaleidoscopic black-and-white images of our unborn child, featured on a screen above the hospital bed. The small room was dark and warm and permeated by the soft drone of electronics. The technician moved her wand across Desiree’s belly and from time-to-time re-applied the ultrasound gel.
It's the first week of Ramadan and, although he's only eight, he's been fasting for a few days. Not all children fast during this important Muslim holiday, but it’s a chance for Omar to be measurably precocious, rather than just a smart ass. The kid's far behind in English, Math, and height, but he makes up for all of it with charm and despotic glee.
Like a lot of big news organizations, the AP, where I work in the Los Angeles bureau, writes obituaries in advance for famous and prominent people that are old, or sick, or otherwise near death. Yes, it's morbid, yes there's something unseemly about it, and yes we all understand this, but it's also necessary to do our jobs properly, and I assure you if you were to die you'd much prefer a thoughtful, well researched remembrance over something dashed off while your body is still cooling off.
