Biking

After Dark in the Apocalypse

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I. Until fairly recently, I had a respectable monthly allowance of expendable income. The target of said expendable income had become, for better or worse, ritzy clothing retailers. Silk, modal, lace, one-hundred-dollar pairs of pants, elaborate bras, uncomfortable shoes: over the years, my wardrobe blossomed like an Anthropologie flower brooch.

These days I make just enough to get by, but I still wear my former life’s clothing. The other evening I found myself sailing on a bicycle down Spring Hill with green-black oil smudging my ankle bones, sweat dripping down my neck: wearing a dry-clean-only blouse. I had loved it five months ago for its color, just slightly off-white, like the inside of a Creamsicle.

II. When we were first outfitting our bicycles with the necessary accessories, I had gotten the mid-range kinda-okay lights, vowing that since bicycling after dark was dangerous and frightening I would only do it when circumstances absolutely required — but it was after midnight when we decided to go on our first bike adventure. We had ridden the mile or so to our friends’ apartment earlier in the evening, and as the night wore on someone suggested we hop on the Minuteman.

It was a cool summer evening, perfect for bike rides, and for back porches and home-brewed cider and surprise-we-own-a-canoe-now-honey anecdotes.

“You guys have never ridden at night?” Angie cried. “We should remedy that. Soon. Right now.”

We’d have to ride on Mass Ave to access the Minuteman’s entrance — an infinite, four to six-lane road that connects everything I know of Boston — and which I had also vowed I would never set bike upon. Mass Ave is terror and frustration, no u-turns allowed. Mass Ave is too important for your tiny legs. Mass Ave would kill you deliberately, slowly and painfully, if it meant getting there five minutes earlier. But I trusted Angie and Aaron’s biking sensibilities. Both of them are the kinds of bikers I’d like to be — which is to say, commuters, builders, repairers, and unrelenting law-abiders.

Aaron donned a blinking vest and showed me how to adjust my helmet for ultimate brains protection. We slung our frames over our shoulders and carried the bicycles down to the streets.

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Photos From Weddings

All My Friends Are Married

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Every Tom and Dick and Harry. Check out the pictures from Kelly and Keegan’s wedding for frisbee golf nets, bagpipe players, nausea-inducing cigars, and the couple making like a less-morose-Lady-Shalott and drifting away in a canoe. Hells yes.


All on board for Marriedtown.


Never thrown.

We camped out on the deserted Woodstock fair grounds that night, under the canopy of the bandstand as a fire crackled in a tin bucket below. I realized I was getting old when, after I’d finally convinced myself there were no ghosts or wild animals to be afraid of, I jumped ten feet in the air to a deep, alien sound: only to realize it was one of the groomsmen, snoring two tents over.

The next morning I crawled crusty-eyed into the daylight, and complained about my hips.

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Branches, On Writing

Branches: Prologue

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Today is around the time I’d hope to crank out another story in the Branches series, but since I devoted last week to writing a fictional piece for Love & Radio around a series of voice mails (that, unfortunately, over the weekend became an internet sensation and thus useless to us), today is finding me ill-prepared in the schedule department. So I thought that, instead, I’d answer a question that potentially needs answering.

What the hell are you doing?

Yeah, seriously! What the hell am I doing? Fiction? Plots? Imaginary . . . characters? What? And this was supposed to be fun and easy! Short and “flash” fiction have always been my favorite formats to read, and what I assumed I’d write, if I only had the time.

And now I have the time! Rejoice, rejoice, Emmaaaaaanuel.

Here’s what I initially hadn’t figured on, and what I promptly figured out a mere few hours after awakening that first blissful, sunny morning of freedom: writing takes practice . . . and I haven’t written any fiction in seven years. Seven years may not sound like so long to the more wizened of us out there, so here’s some perspective: seven years ago is equal, for me, to two life phases ago. That’s pre-post-college working life, pre-college hilarity life, all the way back to mid-high-school omgwtfbbq life when — oh, why pad the truth — I wrote about mermaids.

And cats! The culmination of my fiction-writing career thus far, my epoch, was at the tender age of fourteen, when I realized I could write a story about . . . mercats.

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