October 2, 2013 First Person Radio Silence By Jill Talbot I am driving west on Highway 51. It’s Tuesday, the day before Indie’s ninth birthday, and as I pass the city limits of Stillwater on my way to Oklahoma City, I switch from the Sinatra station, the one playing “I’ll Be Seeing You,” to the seventies station, the one playing Marshall Tucker Band’s “Heard It in a Love Song.” I’m gonna be leavin’ at the break of dawn. I rarely listen to the song now, though sometimes when Indie is in the car, I’ll let it play, even sing along, assume the next time she asks me why he left, I can say, “You know that song, the one about the guy who never had a damn thing but what he had, he had to leave it behind?” She’ll know the song. So many times, when she’s singing along to Ambrosia or Bread, Jackson Browne, especially America, in the car, I ask her how she knows all the words to those long-ago songs, and she always has the same answer, “You sing all the time.” He used to tell me that, too. I change the station to NPR. I recognize a familiar voice: The American family has changed. The nuclear family in the house across the street is still there, but different kinds of families live on the block, too: unmarried parents, gay parents, people who choose not to have children at all and, of course, single parents. A new Pew Research poll asked Americans about these trends and found almost 70 percent believe that single women raising children on their own is bad for society. Of course, there is a wide array of single mothers. Some women choose to raise children by themselves. Others find themselves without a partner through divorce or abandonment. But when seven in ten believe this is bad for society, it makes you wonder. So we want to hear from single mothers today. How do people treat you? Tell us your story. 800-989-8255 is the phone number. Email us, [email protected]. You can also join the conversation on our website. Go to npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. I grip the steering wheel and glance at my cell phone in the cup holder. I keep my eyes out for a rest stop. Read More
September 25, 2013 First Person Bad Call: Meditations on the Pocket Dial By Abigail Deutsch Still from the film Brief Encounter (1945). My acquaintances rarely call me, but their pockets and purses ring me up faithfully. So it is for the Abigails and Aarons, the Abdullahs and Aaliyahs, A. A. and AAA—and one mustn’t forget the Yaschas and Yankels, the Xenas and Zinos. We alphabetical extremists, we who crown and conclude your contact lists: we aren’t a call away so much as a few unintended nudges. Perhaps your finger, seeking lipstick, flicks the “Contacts” key, and your phone highlights the earliest entry—dear old Abelard!—and your knuckle strikes “Call.” Perhaps, in the thick of all that accidental action, your pinky pokes the “Up” button, taking you to the list’s final entry: then it’s cousin Zabrina you’ve piped into your life. Not to alarm you; not to suggest that, at this very minute, an army of Abners and Zilpahs are listening to their cell phones with unseemly interest, picking up on secrets you had never meant to share. No, it’s far more likely we’re hearing whish-whoosh, whish-whoosh: the song of your stride. Is there anything quite like the pocket dial? Does any other form of social intercourse invite us—actually, mandate us—to spy on our acquaintances? Mandate? you ask. Yes, mandate, at least for a few moments. “Hello?” we say, and listen. “Hello?” we say again. And hear the background music of our friends’ lives: the slamming doors, the roaring traffic, the whish and the whoosh. Where is he walking? we wonder. Why is she shouting? And we never find out. Unless, of course, we keep listening. Which I don’t. Hardly ever. Only under duress. When, for instance, years ago, the enigmatic and taciturn youth I had recently started dating called me while he was catching up with his mom. This isn’t invasion, I told myself guiltily, as I noted his thoughtful inquiries and nodded with approval. This is research. This is good for the team. Read More
September 18, 2013 First Person Not Weird About Brooklyn By Helen Rubinstein I had to put my leather loveseat up on Craigslist three times before someone answered the ad, and then that someone, in all of New York City, was the guy my closest friend had been sleeping with a few months earlier. I’d never met him, but I knew that he’d once had to leave her house late at night to go take some kind of medication, and that he got really, really sweaty during sex. Also that he didn’t have Internet access at home, kissed exclusively in chaste little pecks, and had two alarmingly close friends who were women. He and Marie were both writing novels about angels. They’d met at the university where they both taught writing and had both earned MFAs in fiction (at different times), and after they’d written together at a coffee shop one winter afternoon, they relocated to his kitchen table for what Marie called “the download”: a pre-hookup conversation about family and spirituality that lasted for hours. Read More
September 5, 2013 First Person My Nothing to Hide By Amy Grace Loyd I tried not to look. The couple couldn’t see me but I could see them, day and night, if I chose, and often enough I did. It’s a benefit or drawback of urban living that our sight lines in the tight geometry of New York City drive us into the lives of others, into private moments not meant for spectators, if we do not pull the blinds, if we don’t look away or past what’s on offer. I lived in Brooklyn Heights, as I still do, but at the time I found myself on the third floor of a jumble of an old building on the main drag, Montague Street. It’s a street more plaintively commercial and less pretty than the rest of tony Brooklyn Heights; it is more alive with neon and the coming and going of chain stores, salons, restaurants. And with noise, too—from the meals eaten, booze served, and the resulting high spirits, and then those ancient garbage trucks, circling and circling, their brakes screaming. I stayed too long in that one spot probably, but the rent was affordable, the Greek landlord fatherly, a friend who often treated me to dessert and stories, and I felt safe then in what I described as a garret but was merely two small rooms that vibrated from the ventilation units from the restaurant below. The front of my apartment looked out onto Montague. The rear faced an accidental courtyard, the back of the restaurant, Mr. Souvlaki, featuring a fountain that usually didn’t work, a small fenced-in patch of scattered plantings, and the backside of a few apartment buildings. The buildings were close, less than fifty yards from what was my combined kitchen and living room, and the apartment in which I came to see so much was slightly higher than my own, so my vantage allowed me to peer up and in, as if that one living space directly across the way was up on a pedestal. I can’t say when the couple moved in because when they did I’d been in love and my eyes were diverted inside me, charting the ways in which I felt discovered, opened up, prized, or to the moments I’d be near him again, inside the gold of his skin, the wiry lengths of his arms, or to the future of more love and his lips on the back of my neck and shoulders, his tongue writing messages there, everywhere, reaching inside my insides. And there was the pull of his intoxicating smell and even of his home, not in Brooklyn or in New York state, but further north in a place by the Atlantic dotted with sea roses and overrun with green so dense, during the season I met him, that it seemed in revolt, poised to take over. Read More
August 29, 2013 First Person On Keeping a Notebook, Part 2 By Sarah Gerard Read part 1 here. People often ask me whether, as a writer, I prefer to write by hand or on a computer. Realistically, it depends on the kind of writing I’m doing, but for a long time I responded that I preferred writing on a computer because it’s more difficult to write by hand and because writing on a computer is faster. “My thoughts move faster than my hand,” I would say, as if one part of my body was smarter than the other. Of course, this was just an excuse. The first entry of my latest notebook includes the following passage: How much time every day will I have to spend getting all of my thoughts down on paper? But they don’t have to be all of my thoughts. But some may be left behind. Are they really that important? How important are my thoughts? That is the real question here. The question of how much time every day is required for keeping a notebook is—like the question of the difficulty of writing by hand, or that of whether or not someone will read my notebooks, or the question of accuracy or inaccuracy—just a way to keep myself from making work that is “unpresentable.” I don’t mean unfinished—I mean not good. Over the last two years, I’ve managed to scare myself out of treating my notebook as a private space, and trick myself into using it only as a place to reflect on other peoples’ public thoughts under the guise of intellectualism. It is the same fear that beset me three and a half years ago when I took my high school notebooks outside and burned them. What was I afraid of? Of someone I respect seeing work that I found embarrassing, maybe. Of being exposed as a fraud, as if, because I once filled entire notebooks with “free verse” poems about underage sex and drinking, I could never be considered a serious writer. Of someone thinking—proving—that I’m not good enough. Read More
August 28, 2013 First Person On Keeping a Notebook, Part 1 By Sarah Gerard Photograph courtesy of the author. When I decided to move to New York to pursue writing, I took all of the notebooks I’d kept in high school out back of my apartment and burned them on the sidewalk separating my building from my neighbor’s. I didn’t use an accelerant because I expected the paper to burn easily, for the whole pile to go up in flames at the toss of a single match. Instead, I sat on the sidewalk with book after book of matches, tearing the notebooks apart and crumpling them, holding individual pages over the flames so they would catch, watching the spiral bindings blacken but persevere into the eventual pile of ashes and scraps of brown paper left behind an hour later. When my roommate came home, she told me what I’d done was stupid. I’ve kept a notebook since elementary school. Back then, I called it a diary because that’s what my friend Christina called hers. I remember her reading me accounts of eating hot dogs, meeting a cute boy, doing homework: “factual” records of events that were, whether or not important, beats on which to hang memories. I fashioned my diary after Christina’s but eventually grew bored and abandoned it. I didn’t see the point; I didn’t yet know what it meant to record the story of my inner life. I had a completely different relationship with my inner life then. There wasn’t a sense of anxiety around the need to find words for those things I was thinking and feeling. That anxiety came a few years later, in middle school, when my social life took a downturn and I started to keep a notebook again. The first thing I wrote was a song, the lyrics and melody for which are lost forever, as is the notebook. Read More