“I feel like if I was a woman, I’d still be awesome and successful.”  Ladies and gentleman, I introduce my husband, in all his well-meaning, oblivious glory. What could the problem with the patriarchy be? In the past, sure, when women were married off in exchange for livestock… that was bad. But now? Was it … Continue reading C-Level

As it turns out, my father’s friend, Craig, isn’t Irish. My father, apparently, was mistaken about this for decades. Not because he asked, or even really because he thought about it. Craig’s last name sounded sort of Irish, so he assumed he was, and that’s as far as the thought process went. Then twenty-odd years … Continue reading What’s in a name?

My in-laws invited me to a crab boil at the golf club. I— having grown up in the rural Midwest, surrounded by the sort of restaurants that never thought to fly in fresh shellfish, so that Midwesterners might, for a day, pretend to live on the coast of Maine—had never heard of such a thing. … Continue reading The Crab Boil

When my mother went to college, her father told her she was there to get her Mrs. degree. It didn’t go over well. She was nobody’s Mrs., and even though she did meet my father during her college years, he was far from what my grandfather had had in mind. A hard-working musician who patched … Continue reading Here I find myself. In the suburbs.