A Breakfast

A year ago, I met Dreama at Western Steakhouse for breakfast. We both ordered eggs and grits with a pat of yellow butter melting across them.

Our conversation was sweet: Two forty-something moms talking about our children and our neighborhoods, our relationships and our career paths, all of which were wandering and bumpy, filled with the unexpected turns, barriers, and hurdles that women our age have to become particularly adept at navigating.

But our conversation was also disjointed, due in part to our fumbling eagerness to get to know each other but also because of the near-constant stream of people…

I was twenty when my friends and I piled into my Geo Metro and drove north through the night, six of us in that damn little car. We were a funny, rag tag crew, sticking out like sore thumbs in the Bronx — small town kids in a big city — and I found a piece of cardboard and wrote “41 SHOTS” on it in marker and carried it above my head as we joined the protest.

It all seemed so shocking to me then. I was even more shocked when all four officers were acquitted a year later. …

Twelve years ago, I packed up a Uhaul and left the home my son was born in. I drove across the country with him in a car seat, singing hours of nursery rhymes to keep him entertained.

I loved that house — a big, collapsing, and beautiful Victorian farmhouse that my friends and I had sunk years of work into to make it a home. I loved that neighborhood; sweet neighbors who would holler at me to join them on their porch or come over late on New Year’s Eve with Jello shots and gossip. I loved that city —…

Past Is Prologue

As a kid, road trips were marked by dog slobber and historical markers.

We had an ’83 Jeep Cherokee with no heat and no air conditioning. The winters were fine in that car, but the summers were pure hell. Oberon, our Great Dane, would lean his massive head over my shoulder, his drool sliding in long shimmering strings down the back of the seat, pooling by my legs, and sticking my thighs to the vinyl.

We lived in the country, and I spent my elementary school years carsick as we drove up and down mountain roads, gravel spitting out from…

I woke up in a tent on the ridge above Cat Gut on the shortest day of the longest year and shook the morning rain off the fly. My car was parked in a friend’s yard, his house looking like it could slide into the creek, and I nodded to old man chopping wood before kicking my boots and getting in the driver’s seat. He stared at me and spat.

In Charleston, I stopped for hot coffee and walked towards the Kanawha to see the barges. A woman screamed at a man outside the courthouse; not the stately sandstone courthouse…

Past Is Prologue

I think she is trying to stare me down. Her eyes are leveled right at me.

In another space, at another time, we might be friendly. We might chat. I might say, “Excuse me, ma’am, my apologies,” as I bumped into her on my way to pay my bill at the diner. And she might smile at me and say, “No problem, hon.” She might comment on my tattoo, and I might tell her I like hers. Maybe she has a butterfly that makes her think of her mother or a bit of script reminding her to be strong. She…

Our house was way up the side of a mountain and the road that led to it was rutted and potholed. I was small for eight and I could barely see out the backseat window, which was smeared from the dog’s nose. Mountain roads might be the stuff of folk songs, but the truth is they are scary: Deep ravines plummet down with only what seems like inches to spare, loose rocks gather on their edges. …

Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson, a lawman for the ages, tirelessly guards the Confederate statue in Graham basically day and night with his deputies, assigning sometimes dozens of his deputies to the courthouse detail, threat or no threat, like a true patriot.

It’s Sunday night and there are maybe a dozen people on the square, most eating frozen custard. My son has chosen a root beer float, and I have had him turn his Black Lives Matter shirt inside out because, well, it’s hard to say how things will shake down in Graham. …