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Pack of wolves
When my son joined the Cub Scouts, I didn't expect him to learn about peckers, pedophiles and Jesus Christ.
By Stephen G. Bloom
[03/20/00]

I miss lesbian reproductive sex
Little purple sticks, big metal tanks and doing it whether we wanted to or not -- now that's hot.
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[03/17/00]

Power play
What kind of kid would break up with his mother? Mine, apparently.
By Amy Sunshine
[03/16/00]

Divorce karma
My husband dumped me for a very young, very beautiful woman. Then his new love dumped him -- for another woman.
By Lee Uttmark Wicks
[03/15/00]

Sisterhood is powerless
How feminism has made men's lives safer -- and women's more dangerous.
By Jennifer Foote Sweeney and Alisa Smith
[03/14/00]

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Do I say: Rosette, my baby girl, my third and last daughter, the one who looks least like me but sleeps curled into my side each night, hand twined in my hair, spine against mine, the only one who was never rocked by her grandmother Alberta but inherited her full cheeks and winged eyebrows and love for footwear, the one not old enough for piano lessons but who sits at the keys to play a lilting-sad repetitious tune before telling me: "That was for my Gramma Alberta that died before I was born and I never got to even meet her" -- do I say, I don't know much, but this is what I know about all your grandmothers?

Your father's grandmother's mother had no name. Her father, a Cherokee, disappeared when she was a child near Nashville and her mother died when she was 8 or 9. She was taken away from the empty house by a white family who, though this was 1870 or so, used her as a slave.

They named her Fine. She was beaten and denied food and clothing; she picked wild blackberries to survive. One day, searching for berries, she found a bullet by the side of the road. She thought it would be her salvation and revenge against the old woman who abused her most.

While chopping wood and being screamed at one day, she finally hurled it at the veiny pale temple hovering near her. She was astonished when the bullet had no effect, was mistaken for a flying wood chip, and earned her another beating.

She met a man when she was 13. She ran away with him, became pregnant and then was abandoned. She lived in a migrant-worker shack. She had three children this way, and then she made her way to Texas looking for her father, whom she never found. Another man took her into his farmhouse, where she had two more children. When he died, his land and property were stolen by neighboring whites, and she ended up in Tulsa, Okla., where her oldest daughter had moved. Her youngest daughter, Callie, was 16 when she met a man named General Sims. She married him and had six children, including your grandfather, General Sims II.

No one knows where your grandmother Alberta was born. Maybe Mississippi, maybe Arkansas, maybe Calexico, Calif. -- all places where her own mother had traveled to on her hard path west, while having four daughters. Alberta lived in our city, Riverside, all her life. She married General Sims shortly after her high school graduation. She had seven children, including your father.

When your older sisters were born, she loved to hold them, gently bite their cheeks, chew meat into softness they could swallow and rock them to sleep on her chest.

When I was pregnant with you, she died. You were born in August, the same month she was, and of all the kids, you look most like her. You look nothing like the grandmother you have.

My father's mother, Ruby Triboulet, died long before I was born. Her cruel, careless husband abandoned her with her four children for months at a time, and finally took her to live in the high mountains of Colorado, though he'd been warned this could kill her. When my father went to visit, handing her his first child (not me), she suffered a stroke or aneurysm, nearly dropping the baby. She was 50.

My father left my mother when I was 3. She married my stepfather, Grandpa John, but his parents were already deceased, too. And the grandmother I always wanted, the Alberta kind, had died long ago.

In Switzerland, when my mother was only 10 and her two brothers much younger, her soft-spoken, gentle mother died of cancer. All my life, my mother refused to talk about it. Only now has she told me, once, that her mother's body was laid out in the front room, as was done in Europe in 1944, and that her life was never the same. The nurse who had taken care of her mother was a stern, demanding woman named Rosa. She married my grandfather, and after they had their own girl, the whole family moved to Canada.

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