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This week’s essay focuses on those kinds of youthful moments that stay in our memories even as our vision of them changes with time.
Weekly Featured Essay
The Gymnast
by Mark Lucius
The night was made for boredom, but boredom would not prevail. We three high school seniors, nary a wise man among us, traveled to a neighboring school fifteen miles from our southeastern Wisconsin town—looking to fill an empty Friday night in February 1970.
Another Friday, we might have watched basketball, gone to a party, played a few hours of poker with friends. Something we liked better. But all that February night offered was a wrestling meet away from home. A classmate excelled at the sport, so we went to cheer him on. He won, the meet ended, and we left the brightly lit gymnasium for home.
None of us could have guessed that soon, we’d be gambling with our lives.
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Attempting Fate
by Adam Perry
In Sophocles’ The Oedipus Trilogy, the blind prophet Tiresias rocks the worlds of powerful men with visions of the future that warn of the dangers of false pride (what the Greeks called “hubris”). Tiresias’ cameos in the plays of Sophocles are amongst the first instances where the metaphoric connection between blindness and truth was put to paper and allegorized on stage. That metaphor has been explored so often in literature, theatre, film, art, and any number of bad sketch comedy skits throughout history that it deserves its own emoji. Tiresias is also a transgender pioneer of sorts in Greek mythology after spending a few years being transformed into a woman by the Gods for the dastardly deed of whacking a couple of mating snakes with his ancient Greek mobility cane (otherwise known as a stick). I am sure there are any number of deeply researched academic treatises earnestly penned by genders studies experts that interpret what the heck was up with old blind Tiresias going from man to woman and then back to man again after making amends with the amorous snakes. I will spare you my uninformed perspective on that front. As a dude who is going blind, I am naturally more drawn to pontificate on Tiresias’ spot as the “OG” of bad ass blind folks.
Not Built for Children
by Garima Chhikara
It’s one thing not to want something; another to be denied it. I never wanted children. I find them manipulative, burdensome, and annoyingly loud. And, to be fair, so was I until at least twenty-six. The very parts I despise in them are the same ones I’ve been trying to prune out of myself. People romanticize childhood innocence and treat kids like gods just because the world hasn’t touched them yet. But that’s not purity. It’s just inexperience.
Still, I felt something like sadness. A loss I couldn’t quite understand or accept when the doctor told me my chances of bearing a child were very slim.
On Abortion
by Lillian Hogendoorn
There are protesters standing on the northwest corner of Bloor and St. George. They rotate through the intersection throughout the day, big bloody signs on sticks held by the spindly arms of teenage boys and girls with braids in their hair. From where I stand, I can count six of them.
They don’t shout, but you can hear them. “Excuse me, what are your thoughts on abortion?” they politely sing in a round backed by idling engines and footsteps and swirling iced coffees. People brush past, waving their hands and diverting their gaze. Some reach into their pockets to turn up their volume on their true crime podcasts. Others scowl and mumble.
I hesitate—wait for the light to change and change again. The young protesters are owed an answer I don’t have. I am misaligned, thoughts unformed and feelings raw at the edges.
My Grandmother’s Secret
by Lee Jeffers Brami
When I was in my early twenties, my grandmother Annie told me a true story about her childhood that I never forgot. I had read her brief memoir about life as a child in the small Kentucky village where she was born, and I was charmed by it. So was the editor of her town’s local paper, which published her story.
But the paper left out one part of that story, published in 1969. The incident they left out happened when she was seven—in 1897. That story has haunted me ever since, just as it haunted her.
My grandmother was a born storyteller. She could transfix me as a child with stories about Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox. She could recite “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” better than anyone. And when I was very young, she sang me lullabies in her rich alto voice, making me feel, as she used to say, quoting Robert Browning, that “God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the World.”
I can still hear the lilt of her Southern voice, although it’s been fifty years since I last heard it, saw her smile, and smelled the delicate scent of her rosewater cologne. Her infectious laugh warmed me, wrapping the two of us together in a conspiracy of close family friendship.
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