Free Range Librarian

(A portrait of a friend who died nearly twenty years ago, and the last essay in the collection.)
David stands on the corner of Market and Castro, a wide grin spreading under his bottlebrush mustache, a Bible clasped in one hand while the other brushes a thick shag of brown hair from his eyes; his bantam [...]

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(An essay about menopause.)
I wake up at 2 a.m. in a pool of my own sweat and stumble from the bedroom so I do not wake up Sandy. Before menopause crept up on me, I did not realize how many parts of my body could perspire, particularly at once, particularly without the provocations of heat [...]

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(An essay about love and marriage. The following scene takes place after our marriage was invalidated.)
My eccentric one-woman campaign to prevaricate about my marital status might seem a sort of unraveling. After all, no one noticed or cared; it took me a surprisingly long time to realize that anyone reviewing the forms I so defiantly [...]

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(An essay about many things, including squirrels.)
“You got a pet elephant?” asked the lady behind me at Costco as I piled five giant bags of unsalted peanuts in the shell on the checkout counter. It was my second trip to Costco that month. “Squirrels,” I replied, embarrassed. “No, not squirrels, please,” she said, rolling her [...]

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(An essay about learning to swim… and learning to write.)
My decision to pursue my “craft” was not always obvious to those close to me, and when I am sitting before a monitor beaming back at me the computer equivalent of scribbles, I can see and hear my friends as clearly as if I were holding [...]

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(An essay about household moves. It helps to know that at this point in the move I have lost my right slipper.)
Sandy sobbed when she gave away her cross-country skis a couple of weeks ago. “It’s the end of that part of my life,” she said. A neighbor we called in for a second opinion [...]

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(An essay about women, guns, and desire. I hasten to add, if you’re reading these in order, I am not a gun nut, not that it would be so awful if I were; the gun-related excerpts from my essays just make for attention-getting call-outs.)
On the weapons range I lay prone, my gun ready. I silently [...]

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(An essay about transitioning to civilian life, framed around a cross-country trip.)
In his hands, big as briskets, the box of bullets was plain as plain could get, a small tan cardboard box with numbers on the side. But the gun was flat-out sexy: a classic six-chamber Colt .38 with a 4” barrel, perfectly tooled, [...]

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(Two captains, a dying dog, military red tape, and a stolen truck, all set in Korea.)
Three months into my tour, I meet Pat in the laundry room of our barracks one evening, a few days after she arrives at Suwon. A pilot had alerted me that a new lady captain was on base. Out of [...]

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(”Chow” is an essay about food and military life.)
When I got away from Hahn [Airbase], it was as far as I could get, not so much in miles from base as in distance from the endless war training machine, in search of beer and skittles, hungry for another adventure.
I didn’t have to go far. [...]

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