Author Archives: Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

“Truly, my mother was a hard, hard act to follow. Her black chignon, her enormous hats, her flawless, Charles-of-the-Ritz make-up, her back-seamed stockings, their seams razor-straight, her high, high-heeled pumps, her three (never more) pieces of good jewelry . . . .  And then, there was her daughter, who would not sit still, and whose […]

“Repeat after me—with radical empathy: I am a poor, old, disabled, Queer (or Lesbian, or Trans), uneducated, neurodivergent, undocumented, Muslim (or Jewish), Black woman, living in America. Repeat after me, until your empathy is truly radical; until you inhabit each of these identities down to the marrow of your bones; until these women take up […]

“Maya Lin, we need you once again, it seems. But, this time, you will not be memorializing some 58,000 lost souls, but, rather, in America alone, by the time of Biden’s inauguration, over 300,0000. Ms. Lin, you’re going to need more granite. A lot more granite. And, if we are ever to heal from the […]

“In daylight, one person in the house—the straight, white male—regularly storms out to rage impotently at the squirrels. In the night, the insomniac (I) goes out to startle the raccoons on the largest feeder. Delicately, balancing like equilibrists, they lean out on ample haunches from the porch rails, gathering in seed with their sapient paws. […]

“At the beginning of ‘the curriculum that will be COVID,’ I read whatever I could find regarding the influenza pandemic of 1918, an experience that has all but vanished from contemporary memory with the deaths of the last of us who were affected by it. I wanted to educate myself about how viruses jump from […]

“A dear friend of mine, a Southern woman long expatriated to England, sent me the following letter, and I would like to share it, anonymously, with a larger readership . . . for its poignancy and precision. For its perfection in this time of woe. My friend would cast a wan eye on those alliterative […]

“Because I paid for Ouzo, I claimed naming rights and, though he had no ‘papers,’ we knew he had a pedigree. Ouzo was a pure-bred dalmatian, with all the havoc such breeding (such over-breeding) entails, and so I gave him a name with some history, some weight. Because he was both sweet and strong, he […]

“Though Steadman and I—on those so very rare occasions when we meet—are more or less overcome, for the duration of our time together, and all but speechless, remembering our mutual losses, we also comprise, for one another, unique reservoirs of memory. At 68 and 85, respectively, Steadman and I have been actors in the family […]

“Throughout the land, Democrats and Independents alike await (like Godot) the reappearance of Special Counsel Robert Swan ‘Bob’ Mueller III, who, we pray (to no one in particular) will come forth, sooner rather than later, to present evidence of Trump, Pence, Trump campaign members, and Russian operatives’ coordinated efforts to throw our last presidential election. […]

“Because I paid for Ouzo, I claimed naming rights and, though he had no ‘papers,’ we knew he had a pedigree. Ouzo was a pure-bred dalmatian, with all the havoc such breeding (such over-breeding) entails, and so I gave him a name with some history, some weight. Because he was both sweet and strong, he […]