Sample scenes from May 10 class

One night I was out running errands while Bruce was paying the bills. When I came in the door and looked from his stricken face to the pile of bills sitting on the table, I felt as though I’d been out dancing, or smoking crack, or having an affair with a Spaniard. The checkbook dangled from his hand in a gesture that semaphored defeat. I suddenly felt guilty for all those boxes of See’s Candies I’d been buying. My husband went to the kitchen. He poured himself the grimmest bowl of cereal ever poured. He hunched over it, his beautiful long spine bent almost to an inverted U, and said, “I just have to say this, Our savings account is almost gone.”

I gave him a hug but didn’t really know what to say. I was already freelancing as much as I could. I was trying to be frugal ...

—Claire Dederer, Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses

When we moved into our achingly suburban neighborhood ten years ago, I was dismayed by all the grass lawns, and by all the time, noise, gasoline, chemical warfare and air pollution invested in maintaining them. In a fit of reactionary protest I bought a human-powered push mower. The first time I mowed my front lawn, it actually drew a crowd of neighborhood kids, who’d never seen such a contraption before.

“How come your mower doesn’t have a motor?” one asked.

I felt a teachable moment coming on. “Because there’s only so much gasoline left on earth,” I said. “We ought to save it for more important things than mowing lawns.”

The kid stood there for a moment, looking thoughtful. I wondered if I’d successfully implanted the conservation germ. He turned and wandered away. A few minutes later he was back.

“I told my dad what you said,” he reported. “He said you’re a nut.”

—Lawrence W. Cheek, The Year of the Boat

Nothing typified the realms of male and female as clearly as my parents’ walk-in closets. Home alone for any length of time, I always found my way inside them. I could stare at my parents’ clothes for hours, grateful for the stillness and silence, haunting the very heart of their privacy.

The overhead light in my father’s closet was a bare bulb. Whenever I groped for the chain in the dark, it wagged back and forth and resisted my grasp. Once the light clicked on, I saw dozens of ties hanging like stalactites.... Shirts were cramped together along the length of an aluminum pole, their starched sleeves sticking out as if in a halfhearted gesture of greeting. The medicinal odor of mothballs permeated the boxer shorts that were folded and stacked in a built-in drawer. Immaculate underwear was proof of a tenderness my mother couldn’t otherwise express; she may not have touched my father often, but she laundered his boxers with infinite care.

—Bernard Cooper, “Burl’s”

One rainy March morning two years later, the phone rings. Do you want the Indian pictures? she says. Their eyes make me sad. Because of her voice, you rush over. When she answers the door, the framed pictures of the chief and the brave are stacked by the door, the babies are crying, kittens are mewing, and darkness circles your sister’s eyes. You hope it is from sleeplessness but you’re not sure. I’ve got to do something about all this, she says, spreading her arms to include the brown sofa, the vinyl chair, her husband’s tray of stale ashes. She has five dollars in her purse. You have twenty. Today, she says. You pack the children into the car seats and pull away from the curb in search of spring ....

—Rebecca McClanahan, “Interstellar”

The first time I cheated on my husband, my mother had been dead for exactly one week. I was in a cafe in Minneapolis watching a man. He watched me back. He was slightly pudgy, with jet-black hair and skin so white it looked as if he’d powdered it. He stood and walked to my table and sat down without asking. He wanted to know if I had a cat. I folded my hands on the table, steadying myself; I was shaking, nervous at what I would do. I was raw, fragile, vicious with grief. I would do anything.

“Yes,” I said.

“I thought so,” he said slowly. He didn’t take his eyes off me. I rolled the rings around on my fingers. I was wearing two wedding bands, my own and my mother’s ....

—Cheryl Strayed, “The Love of My Life”

Fourteen-year-old Jamie has a secret. Not many of her friends know, but she’s a junkie. And not your typical junkie. She’s addicted to vinyl.

Jamie began listening to vinyl when she was 12 and her dad taught her how to handle LPs and his direct-drive turntable. She would sit for hours listening to Jimi Hendrix, The Moody Blues, The Beatles, ZZ Top .... She says she even finds a lot of her dad’s jazz records to be cool. She and her dad don’t do a lot together. He goes to all of her basketball games, and school functions, but they didn’t just hang out together. Now though, Jamie says she finds they sit and listen to LPs and talk about the music a few hours every week.

Jamie says she has learned more about her dad in the last year than she learned in the previous 13. She says an album takes him back to what was going on his life as a teenager. He’s told her about his mom dying and the effect that had on him as an 18-year old as they were listening to Madonna’s first album ...

—Steve Aagard