The Party Line, literacy, and fatherhood during a pandemic
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and Literary Hub. Each essay in this newsletter has been selected by the editors at the above publications as the best of the week, delivered to you all in one place.
For a Good Time, Call
by Natalie Lima
I am too old for an imaginary friend. But I am too young for most other things. In the middle of 1999, I turn thirteen. My best friend Maria and I don’t have the internet yet to occupy ourselves with sketchy online chat rooms. We don’t have cell phones. No money. No cars.
What Is Left, What Is Held, What Is Grown As Roots
by Hope Wabuke
She would have laughed at one of his jokes; they had an easy rapport by then; it would have been over a year since we moved to town and her frightened eyes—like so many shopkeepers when they had first seen our Black bodies in that small white majority town—had widened, body tensing and hands resting underneath the counter until my father greeted her, his accent and silly jokes relaxing her until they established that one of her extended relatives had worked in the same city in Uganda as my father before they had both left because of the violence of dictator Idi Amin. In that moment of shared history, she began to see us as human beings, like her, not the stereotyped thuggish threats that she’d been made to fear. She would talk to us, then, away from that spot that held the store’s alarm button and its gun.
Survival Soup
by Andy Mingo
You could say that I have trained for this pandemic all my life. I used to watch Thunder Cats and G.I. Joe after I’d ride the bus home from school, in Reno where I grew up. I’d let myself into an empty house, grab a Pop Tart, and turn on the three-channel, black-and-white TV in my room. After a couple hours, my second stepdad, Pidge, would come back from his temporary construction job. When I’d hear his truck coming down the street, I’d hoard some more snacks and then quietly lock myself away in my room for the remainder of the night. My own early quarantine.
At Their Own Pace: Why Reading Is Not an Inherent Moral Good
by Katherine Gaudet
But by the start of second grade, my laissez-faire attitude was getting harder to maintain. Chance moments with my daughter’s friends showed me how far ahead of her they were in reading ability; her report cards started to be filled with the number 2—“approaching grade level,” rather than meeting or exceeding it. I did not, I reminded myself, care about this. I railed to my husband about the reading log we were supposed to be filling out daily, tallying minutes of reading and adding our signatures, for accountability. I didn’t want it to be such a chore, I said, and furthermore I had enough jobs to do without becoming a reading accountant. But I am a Goody-Two-Shoes, and for a few weeks I scribbled in approximations of reading time that I might have inflated slightly, but not enough to earn the reward of a Pizza Hut gift certificate.
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