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My Late, Great Bipolar Friend: A Sphere in Flatland
“I actually prefer the old term, ‘manic depression,’ to the new term for what Sally dealt with: bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder sounds like something tetchy and small; something amiss amongst the spark plugs;…
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In The Shadow of The Giant Peachoid: Upstate South Carolina BBQ
“The dives I snuck into back in the late 60s in Athens, Georgia were after-hours clubs often raided by the local police. They were unique in being “integrated” establishments: as throughout that entire…
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Native Speakers of Cancerspeak
“Considering their diminutive proportions, my breasts have generated hubbub and alarm incommensurate with their size, and I’ve weathered angst-ridden weeks, enduring mammograms, ultrasounds, and biopsies, and then awaiting test results. Where are those…
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Summer Houseguests
Ruminant With A View By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring “Hospitality is making your guests feel at home, even if you wish they were.”—Anonymous “Staying with people consists in your not having your own way, and…
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Shopping for Elegance (With My Mother)
“Though she came up and out of a tiny, Upstate South Carolina hamlet, population 100 at most, she had an uncanny eye; an unfailing, unwavering instinct about what objects, what clothing, what design,…
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Scent & Sensibility: The Passion Flower
“Long ago, the day before my-then-fiancé, Kevin Andrews, drowned before my eyes off the Greek island of Kythira, I was walking up a cobbled path in the island’s main town of Hora, when…
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Death at The Dance: Depression
“For we depressives are suspended throughout the vast, shadowy circles of hell; beneath, below and out of sight of even the ‘Purgatorio,’ let alone the ‘Paradiso’ and the stars beyond. Unless rescued, guided…
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Assholes at the Front of the Yoga Class: Asana in America
“I am working my way—again—through X-rays and skull scans, but I have, finally, come to the conclusion that Yoga as we practice it, as we are taught it, in the West, is not…
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My Mother’s Cookbooks
“Just inside ‘The Art of Eating: The Collected Gastronomical Works of M.F.K. Fisher’—and, remember, my mother was, first of all, a reader, and only second, reluctantly and late, a cook—there is a two-page…
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For the Love of Sushi (in Teaneck NJ)
“The story of the Teaneck Sushi Buffet in Bergen County, New Jersey, is actually more of a cross-cultural love story than a fish tale. Tommy McGlew, originally of Fort Lee, and his wife,…