Shilo  — you can guess that’s not her real name, but it’s the one I’ll call her by this time — was the granddaughter of a close neighbor, and she visited for one wild week each summer.  Her story has gone through multiple tellings, and so, oddly, has the song that forms the backdrop of memory. ...
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The original is coffee-stained, but it’s been scanned and copied, and committed to my heart: “Never had a friend like you/ Shove you in a hole, and you bury me/ So what’s it going to take, come break me…” You wrote that on the close of… well, it had been quite a weekend.  I...
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I had been proud, since my church nursery days, of having a brother who was Superman — even though his super powers diminished the further he got from the home base of my room. He didn’t have x-ray vision, he had lazy eye, and he struggled to learn to read.  In fact, he ran...
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It happened when the shah got deposed, or rather afterward.  My mother said that the shah was one of the things they weren’t prepared for, she and Daddy.  He was one of the reasons things went awry in the family businesses.  Before that, evidently, we had been well on our way to being rich,...
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My first Christmas memory is of shrieking and running across the room to my new walking doll.  The grownups told me to stand back to back with her, and declared that she was taller.  I am not sure if it was that year or the one after that I asked, “If Christmas is Jesus’...
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This is an actual quote retrieved from Wikipedia this evening, and it brings back memories: “Front Royal, settled by whites as early as 1738, was originally known as Lehewtown, and was also known as ‘Helltown’, due to the abundance of rough and wild mountaineers and river travelers in the area who came into town looking...
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My brother had a party for his seventh birthday.  His idea of celebration was to run and hide.  I joined forces with his classmates , two years my senior, to try and chase him down. With my own classmates, I would not have been so bold.  Newly five, I had already experienced a year of...
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Someday I will put it on Squidoo, and I imagine people will be surprised that it wasn’t there before, or that I have a dozen years of letters, many of them handwritten, from… no not a household name, but someone with a few radio hits way back when.  Or that there’s a picture of...
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I am six, and I have failed swimming twice — or at least failed to progress from beginning beginners to intermediate beginners.  I swim in a styrofoam floatie, or, hanging on the edge of the pool, or in class, when the teacher supports my tummy and lets me  move both my arms and legs...
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I missed half of my 4th grade year. I think the adventure might have begun with the school portrait I brought home that year, the one that caused my mother to say over and over, “Something is the matter with Karen,” and my aunt to respond soothingly, on the weekends she came over, “Don’t...
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“This way, Karen,” Mother calls to me from across the Safeway parking lot. I walk straight ahead. “Over here.” The line of my mouth matches the straight line I walk. I am angry at her for not listening to what I know she can hear. So many times I have tried to explain: In...
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She clicks submit, and immediately she’s followed by some-bot-y new. No, two! She doubts those two are people, but they are followers. And she’s pulled even again! She can follow who she wants without the stats growing lopsided. In a world that… would’ve sounded like sci-fi ten years earlier, who to follow today? Dalai...
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She called when she went home that first Christmas. His almost ex-girlfriend kicked the door in. He had a new door by the following Christmas, and regrets that went back years. He’d gotten scared, he explained. “Why?” she asked. “I meant everything I told you.” “Well, I knew that,” he said. “It’s what scared...
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