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karen @karen ?
active 6 months, 3 weeks ago-
Shilo — you can guess that’s not her real name, but it’s the one I’ll call her by this time — was the granddaughter of a close neighbor, and she visited for one wild week each summer. Her story has gone through multiple tellings, and so, oddly, has the song that forms the backdrop of memory. It’s [...]
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karen wrote a new blog post: Leaving Only Traces 1 year ago · View
The original is coffee-stained, but it’s been scanned and copied, and committed to my heart: “Never had a friend like you/ Shove you in a hole, and you bury me/ So what’s it going to take, come break me…”
You wrote that on the close of… well, it had been quite a weekend. I don’t remember [...] -
karen commented on the blog post Looking Back | Memoir Prompt 1 year, 1 month ago · View
Oh, boy, what a prompt. For some of us, the question becomes how much we dare waft out into the world…
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karen wrote a new blog post: Superman Grows Up 1 year, 1 month ago · View
I had been proud, since my church nursery days, of having a brother who was Superman — even though his super powers diminished the further he got from the home base of my room. He didn’t have x-ray vision, he had lazy eye, and he struggled to learn to read. In fact, he ran and [...]
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karen commented on the blog post Learning Christmas | Memoir 1 year, 1 month ago · View
What a nice story! It’s cool that those first Christmas gifts were handmade.
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karen wrote a new blog post: In Iran and Appalachia | Memoir 1 year, 1 month ago · View
It happened when the shah got deposed, or rather afterward. My mother said that the shah was one of the things they weren’t prepared for, she and Daddy. He was one of the reasons things went awry in the family businesses. Before that, evidently, we had been well on our way to being rich, though [...] -
karen wrote a new blog post: Little Girl Christmases (Visiting Jesus by Alaska Air) 1 year, 1 month ago · View
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karen commented on the blog post My Senior Mistakes | Memoir 1 year, 1 month ago · View
I tend to suspect that if you had done things differently, you’d write with about the same same skill, but have more credentials. When I was growing up, people believed that the demons one carried were small in comparison to that almighty degree, and that if one merely got the scholarships and the degrees they’d [...]
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karen commented on the blog post In Search of My Grandfather’s Grapes 1 year, 2 months ago · View
I can picture that. We had grapes, too, and they were Concord. I have encountered them seldom over the years, and there was a time they almost didn’t seem real.
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karen wrote a new blog post: Blackberry Dumplings in Helltown 1 year, 2 months ago · View
This is an actual quote retrieved from Wikipedia this evening, and it brings back memories: “Front Royal, settled by whites as early as 1738, was originally known as Lehewtown, and was also known as ‘Helltown’, due to the abundance of rough and wild mountaineers and river travelers in the area who came into town looking for [...]
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karen wrote a new blog post: Lessons That Hide 1 year, 2 months ago · updated 1 year, 2 months ago · View
My brother had a party for his seventh birthday. His idea of celebration was to run and hide. I joined forces with his classmates , two years my senior, to try and chase him down. With my own classmates, I would not have been so bold. Newly five, I had already experienced a year of bullying. [...]
Karen, I found your entry but it wasn’t being listed on the front page. I added your name and memoir so it would show up. Are you okay with that?
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karen commented on the blog post The Horror of It All 1 year, 2 months ago · View
So succinct and powerful — the sort of piece that leaves one feeling what you’re saying without you quite saying it.
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karen commented on the blog post Letter to an Unnamed Teacher 1 year, 3 months ago · View
The mysteriousness wasn’t an intentional stylistic device (sigh). I did think the tale would sound better with some details, but… Usually one can tell a story with quite a bit of detail, as long as they leave names out. That isn’t the case when the person is well known. If I’m refusing to look them [...]
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karen wrote a new blog post: Letter to an Unnamed Teacher 1 year, 3 months ago · View
Someday I will put it on Squidoo, and I imagine people will be surprised that it wasn’t there before, or that I have a dozen years of letters, many of them handwritten, from… no not a household name, but someone with a few radio hits way back when. Or that there’s a picture of me wearing [...] -
karen commented on the blog post The Reunion 1 year, 3 months ago · View
I keep looking at that, and I keep trying to say the right thing, but what I keep coming back to is… Lord, what presence of mind. Presence of mind… or faith… or something. I counted 55 words in that piece. Which means you counted 55 words. Which means… I don’t know what that means, [...]
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karen commented on the blog post Memoirs: A Moment that Changed Your Life 1 year, 3 months ago · View
Good prompt and assignment. It is nice to submit pieces to conventional publishing sometimes, and that prompt sounds conducive to powerful writing.
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karen commented on the blog post You go first 1 year, 4 months ago · View
In a similar situation, my sibling would have found himself by his lonesome.
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karen commented on the blog post The Day I Almost Drowned 1 year, 4 months ago · View
Looking around afterwards and realizing no one noticed… that was not as terrifying, but I bet it was at least as haunting afterwards.
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karen commented on the blog post Shifting Elements 1 year, 4 months ago · View
Oh, I wanted to respond to that earlier — didn’t have time this morning. I wish I had quoted my father as saying “You acted like you could take on the world,” which would have captured the meaning better, even though I think he did say “take the world by storm”. Both my parents said [...]
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karen commented on the blog post Shifting Elements 1 year, 4 months ago · View
Yeah, pretty much exactly: dog paddle, underwater or on back — back preferred. Curious, I never heard anyone say that particular thing — that they couldn’t coordinate the breathing thing. In PE, the focus was generally on how many times one could do something in an alloted amount of time, or how much endurance they [...]
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