Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer.
Tag: Childhood
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This past weekend, I drove back to the place where my story began. The road to my mother’s house is the same as it’s always been. That drive always stirs something in me. A reminder of who I was before the world turned hard and unforgiving. I didn’t just go to see my mom. I…
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I was twenty-three when they sent me home. Three summers of devotion, three years of sunburns and scraped knees, of singing around the fire and waking up before dawn to make sure my campers were safe, fed, and cared for. I had built my world around the summer camp where I spent every summer since…
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The world never roots for the stegosaurus. It doesn’t have the sleek, predatory prowess of the Velociraptor, the sheer brute force of the Tyrannosaurus rex, or even the rebellious charm of the Triceratops. If the dinosaur kingdom were a high school, the T. rex would be the star quarterback, the raptors would be the overachieving…
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When I think of the places I used to know, the locations where keyframe events in my life took place, I feel desideratum. Almost as if there is a feeling of loss, or grief for something lost, as if in that moment I was part of something I cannot see. Forever lost, though completely intangible…
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The wreckage of my past is the war that’s never won. Often times I think about all the things that were said to me so many years ago; I would always listen to the negativity, silently as if I were laying down in the wake of someone else’s incompetence or insecurities, my elders and a…
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It is curious how one’s fears change as we grow older. When I was a child, I had the typical and classic childhood fears; fear of the dark, fear of death, fear of getting hurt, but above all else, I had an irrational and overwhelming fear of mirrors. Fear is the emotional paralytic that draws…
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My earliest memories are of being a small child sitting on the marble floor of our Greenwich Village apartment. There was something comforting in the coolness of that floor, in its immovability, in its seeming lack of opinion or judgment. It was a respite from the complexities of life in a large city with multiple…
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When my parents moved me to our second house, I was instantly drawn towards a hundred year old maple tree in the back yard. As the years went by, the tree became my inspiration, my childhood joy, and the one spot I would always run to whenever I needed a good cry. I would often…
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Minutes of daylight, as the minutes turn into hours, is the parlance of our time. Every time I look in the mirror, I see myself staring right back at me; a fleeting glimpse of myself going round and round on a carousel cusp of why. I will never understand why my parents moved me around…
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As I stand on the cusp of selling my childhood home in New York City, I find myself thinking a lot about growing up in Greenwich Village in the 1980s. The sights, sounds, and even the smells of the neighborhood are etched into my memory. Those cobblestone streets, the street performers in Washington Square Park,…
