Vixen Chronicles

I walked faster, not wanting to be caught outside after the sunset, alone in a strange downtown. My friends had all arrived on earlier flights and were meeting me. The silent tap-tap of the navigation app on my wrist guided my steps as I searched for the restaurant and tried not to look like the tourist that I was. The place was in the middle of an outdoor mall. The stores were about to close and it was semi deserted, although the street outside was still bustling with pedestrians walking to clear the area, the same as I was, while the people of the night were hunkering down to get through the evening.
It was a warm one. I was struck by the number of homeless men and women I saw in the short, two block walk. I don’t know if their number was high, or if the suburbs had sequestered me from the rawness that downtown Denver was spewing. The tidiness of the day was going to bed for the night and pulling the covers up around its neck, and I got the sense that downtown was about to show it…

Last week, I spent the day at a high school, talking about writing and books. when I showed up, I had absolutely no idea what I was going to talk about, or if I was going to read from any of my books. On the way there, I received a Facebook notification that someone had mentioned me and made a comment about A Letter for My Mother--the book I'd edited--creative non-fiction, and since it was close to Mother's Day, I decided to spotlight this book.
     If you follow me, you know the story of how this book started. The MIL whom I'd believed to share a mutual feeling of dislike with was dying, and the thought of her leaving this plane was very painful to me.  I was bewildered by these feelings and being that I was across the country, could not go to her. So I wrote her a letter, and filed it. Later, on reading the letter, I thought it should be published somewhere and the book was born.       The task was not as simple as it seemed. I found myself shepherding, almost coun…

All of my Christmas Shopping is done without out me setting foot in a mall. Everything is wrapped, in coordinating paper and placed under the Christmas Tree. All of the kids know the rules; they must avert their eyes as if nothing is there. This is how Black Santa works.

     He is magical.

     The boxes are actually empty until the stroke of Midnight of Christmas Eve, when the presents materialize inside their wrappings. If you open them early, you will only find coal or air.
The offspring understand this, though I did catch Midime checking out a few boxes this week. The stockings were disturbed,too. It's hard to get away with that stuff, even if you try really hard to return the boxes back to the exact spot they were in before you meddled with them when you have a mother who studies behavior and watches people for a living.

     Yesterday, new gifts started appearing under the tree, very easy to spot because the kiddos didn't use the coordinated paper I so painstaking…

Family trip.Girl is lamenting about having to carry her brand new, school issued laptop to school every day.  "I wish this was the 90s," she says. "Then all I would need was pen and paper." Flight delay. Fast forward two hours. We've decided to peruse the airport mall while we wait.  There's a record store.  She's bewildered. We try to explain. "How'd you take your music with you?" "You didn't," we say. There was no sharing with your friends. No texting.  Phone calls cost money. And oh, no YouTube. Or Snapchat. She's flabbergasted. And then she adds "And everyone shared just one phone?" We nod. "Just one wall phone." It's our turn to be confused and then it hits us. We burst into laughter. The phone was on the wall. And couldn't fit in your pocket. It couldn't surf the web or be used to write fan fiction. It didn't take pictures. And people thought hard about using it after ten pm.

If you've read "A letter for my Mother", you probably realize that Mother's Day is a hard one for me. Not hard, as in difficult, but more like awkward. My family lost my mother before I was old enough to make gifts at school or make her breakfast in bed, so I spent those years making Mother's Day cards for my father before that was a thing and when teachers would still say that your family of your black father raising  two small kids was not a family. My father would accept his cards filled with puns based around him being the best "mother-father" in the world with half a smile on his face and keep on going. But we went through. As I came into my own womanhood and had children on my own, I was blessed with a older sibling that stood in to help me find my way into grownupness. Although circumstances might have dictated that we not be friends, her mother had taught her to hold ALL siblings close. She'd taught her that when your parents pass on to the …