Pretty is not something I often feel

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 03:00:00 +0000

Aaron and I met at the pool table in the Atlanta Hilton. I noticed him because he was watching me play terrible pool. He was tall and broad shouldered, in baggy pants and a button-down. A red bandanna was tucked into his back pocket. We were at a professional conference, far from both our homes. It was the end of the second day, and people were filling the hotel bar, discussing the events and workshops, still assessing each other. Everyone at the bar, me included, gave off an aura of trying too hard, of having carefully considered each item of clothing and the message it might send. Aaron, though, looked urban and educated as if it were effortless. (Aaron is not his real name, by the way.)

He bought me the first drink after I managed to scratch and knock the 7-ball onto the floor in a single shot. By the second drink, I’d already decided I liked him. There was something about the way he looked at me that made me feel attractive, pretty even.

Our cupboard was bare

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:41:00 +0000

We only had to do it once last summer. Only once because when friends got wind of what was happening, they sent gift cards to Albertsons and Safeway, money even. I'm a writer, so I'm supposed to know how to say difficult things, how to blend the mundane with the significant, how to tell a story, how to make the sad at least bearable. I started e-mails in which I blathered on about my love for Mary Jane shoes, or my obsession with Neko Case, hoping to find a moment where I could say, "By the way. Last week? I took the kids to a soup kitchen." I wrote e-mails about Cuba and the welfare system and the crumbling middle class, yet none of them landed in an in box with the admission that I had taken my kids one Tuesday in July, drove downtown and walked into a soup kitchen to eat dinner -- parking far enough away so that no one would see we actually had a car.

A man with scarred skin was at the door. He wore a tiny gold hoop in his ear and as he talked to the older gentleman in front of us, he tugged the earring in a circle. When we were next, he smiled at the kids and asked their names. Chloe, the eldest at 9, mumbled hers, but Ivan and Giselle answered happily. At 7 and 5, they thought we were at some kind of special restaurant. I had told them we were going to a place called the Dining Room, and had said it was a "soup kitchen." I had even explained that we needed to go because we didn't have enough food to make it through the month. Only Chloe, though, knew what that meant.

Salon.com > Heather Ryan

Pretty is not something I often feel

Our cupboard was bare