by Laurie Wagner | Sep 24, 2013 | Uncategorized
Because I hate small talk. Because I don’t like beating around the bush. Because I’m a terrible liar and I feel like I’m polluting the air if I’m going on about things that I don’t care about. I tell true stories because then I don’t have to keep everything inside of me, pretending that the second martini I had the other night was no big thing. That taking the wrong exit off the bridge as I drove home was an honest mistake. I tell true stories because, like the poet Alison Luterman says, “If something is in your way then it’s going your way,” which means the worry over those martinis is worth writing about because they are, well, in my way. I can pretend they don’t bother me. I can chalk it up to being tired and the fun of being with an old friend. But what did bother me was that wrong turn, how I found myself heading north late at night instead of south – which gets me thinking about the other areas where I am going the wrong way. I tell true stories because of these bridges, the ones that connect you to me when we reach for real words that accurately describe the approximate weight of our love and our sadness, words that speak to what’s actually happening in our marriages and in our relationships, how we are dealing with aging – that march toward the inevitable – and how honestly we’re living our lives in the face of that. I go deep and I get real in person and on the page because...
by Laurie Wagner | Sep 9, 2013 | Blog
“’I should have stayed at the dance.’” That’s what I was thinking as I sat in my friend’s car. The mood was tense. Julie had insisted on leaving the dance right after Homecoming Queen was announced. She hadn’t won like she’d hoped. I had.” These are the beginning lines of my daughter’s college admission essay. She’d been trying to come up with ideas for what to write about for weeks. Like most kids, she felt the pressure to make herself look good – no, better than good – incredible – out of this world – yes, she felt she’d need to appear more amazing than she actually was in order to capture the attention of a college admissions director. But the night she came up with those lines she felt like mashed up dog meat – and there’s nothing tantalizing about that. How can one of the best nights of your life also be one of the worst? My husband and I had heard that she’d won Homecoming Queen hours before when her sister called from the dance screaming, “she won! Ruby won!” My husband and had been rebels and misfits in high school. We didn’t know from Home Coming, yet there we were bouncing up and down on the couch like we’d just won the lottery. The thing was, when Ruby dragged her sorry self home two hours later she didn’t look half as happy as we were. Her mascara had run down the sides of her cheeks, she wobbled in her high heels as she crossed the threshold of our home, her black heels scuffed, her tight...
