Last weekend, Sarge and I went to the pub (OK, two pubs) to meet with friends and prove that he had survived meeting my mother. We left the first pub in search of another one with an accessible toilet. I spend half my life needing to pee, and the other half looking for an accessible toilet to pee in. I have accepted this as an interesting/annoying part of my life, and go with it. Or not. (Pun maybe intended, I…
I was sitting in an airport chair, waiting for my chair to roll through on the baggage-claim belt. Sarge and I were trying to convince the Sky Cap my chair would be through on Over-size Items, which meant we were waiting in the wrong place. Sarge was tired, and I was just wired and wanted to get OUT. We got our bags, and then Sarge pointed over my head. ‘It’s over there,’ he said, pointing to my chair which had…
When my father got us to the airport early, I knew something would go wrong. If we had been ‘down to the wire’ as he likes to say, the plane would have been on time. As it was, we were early. And the plane was late. I’d been in holiday-mode since the day before. We’d been at a ‘Scottish’ shop not long after it opened, stocking up on shortbread and other suitably-touristy-but-still-tasteful-maybe gifts for my New York family. Soon after,…
A few weeks ago, Sarge and I were at the post office before most people are awake on a Saturday morning. ‘Nobody’s here,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s in bed. It’s 9.03 in the morning.’ We were dropping off my passport renewal form before boarding a train to Glasgow for the weekend. I checked the envelope for the thousandth time. ‘I forgot to cut and staple one of the two photos to the form,’ I was quoting the form. The same form…
As a result of sorting out my piles, I have found a bunch of my old poetry. Most of it is really bad, and should stay in the drawer. I wrote a lot of poetry as a teenager, trying to find my voice, and wondering who might hear mine. Even as an eight year-old I wrote of black roses and thunderstorms and violins at midnight. Getting older didn’t mean I was any less maudlin. But I did begin to write…
