Tag Archives: New York City

A Long Way Home

Humility breeds optimism, so we had assurance in loads. Still, it pained me to go. The heartland, like the heart, is sick and deceitful; it cannot be trusted. The heart is what kept us in Wichita for two long years and had I continued to follow it, the girls and I would still be some fifteen hundred miles behind, away from the world’s best city.

Go For Yours

In A Revolutionary Life, John Lee Anderson wrote Che Guevara had a sense of security only trust fund beneficiaries understand. Recently, I came across decade-old letters and emails I’d sent the administrator of my now dissolved family trust that made me both cringe at my audacity and smile at my courage. Funding requests for an automobile, back mortgage payments, gifts for my brothers, relocation, graduate school summer tuition, a kitchen remodel for mom’s home with a surprise truck on the side, and an appeal for funding to pay my housing for three years while earning an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature (a notably unprofitable degree I would complete a year early) littered my outbox and clear plastic file box. I imagined myself an attorney presenting my case for financial support on the latter matter, and with the beneficiaries—my two elder brothers, mother and I—evenly at odds on whether the trust should support my next academic endeavor in New York, I argued in the most upstanding manner I knew how, with a series of questions meant to illicit facts.