All in Personal essay
As an American expat teaching English in high schools and universities in the Philippines, YourLifeIsATrip.com contributor BJ Stolbov's students often ask him, “What makes Americans American?” Learn why it's a question that he finds difficult to answer as America becomes increasingly socially and politically divisive and discover how his answer is still one that unites.
During a celebratory trip to New York City, a chance encounter on a subway train provides writer Katherine Doll with a sober reminder of both the fragility and the robustness of the human heart, when she witnessed a young woman struggle with her own tragedy.
by Leslie Anne Wood
My cell phone rang on a Saturday afternoon and the news was not good. My father had collapsed at his retirement home and had been taken to the hospital.
by Dan Dworkin
To travel solo for days in a kayak is to be not on or in but of the water. It loves you, rocks you like your mother did, speaks to you with many voices, supports your meandering, bathes you, feeds you, tells you when to travel and when to stay still on the island of the moment. On every trip there is a time of storm, of being wind-bound when the judicious kayaker stays put, writes, rests, wanders, constructs stone sculptures and listens for the still, small voice.
by BJ Stolbov
Maria Natividad Pascua Olivar has died. Nanay Mary (Mother Mary), as she was known, was 76 years old. Her husband, Ruben Olivar died suddenly 36 years ago, leaving Nanay a single mother with six young children. Her eldest, Rowell, died when he was hit by a car at 6 years old. Her next eldest, Ronaldo died suddenly of a heart attack 9 months ago at the age of 50. With her four surviving children, two daughters and two sons, all now in the 40’s, around her bed, and after a long sickness, a confluence of incurable old-age illnesses, Nanay Mary breathed her last. She died peacefully.
by C.Z. Cantrell
Tides have a rhythm and so do our lives. My sea changed when I said yes to a position as a prison teacher. The tide moving out would take away my comfortable, if modest-paying work as a government analyst. The incoming tide, teaching hard-core prisoners, could flood my life with adventure and even danger.
When writer Barbara Wysocki is accidently separated from her tour group in Havana, Cuba, she's eventually reunited, but not without a few happy mishaps along the way.
by Elyn Aviva
We punched in the entry code on the keypad on the side of the looming concrete storage building, opened the door, and walked down the empty, darkened corridors to our numbered unit. We unlocked the roll-up metal door and pushed it up, revealing a colorful hodgepodge of items stacked along the walls and piled on metal shelving units in the center. We were entering a mysterious domain, a mixture of refuse dump and Treasure Island.
This was the stuff we had left behind six years ago in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when my husband, Gary, and I moved to Spain. Now that were happily settled as expats in Girona, Catalonia, Spain, the time had come to clear out the storage unit. No more excuses.
I was 22 when a friend persuaded me to see a psychic in my home town on New Zealand’s west coast. At the time I was studying science and psychology at university, so I told myself psychic predictions were fanciful. But I was curious too. Like most young women, I wanted to know when I would meet the man of my dreams.
by Dan Dworkin
What would you do if you were asked to voluntarily give up your cell phone, computer, TV, and sex for a month? When I revisited my Peace Corps assignment after forty-two years away, the people of my village in Fiji, indeed the residents of the whole province, were doing just that, in a manner of speaking. They were giving up tobacco, yaqona (kava), their ceremonial drink, and sex for a month. Why would they do such a thing?
One hundred and forty years ago, the people of a nearby village, Nabutautau, killed and ate the Methodist Reverend Thomas Baker. When I visited in July, 2011 they were conducting a ceremony of reconciliation, begging the Methodist Church to forgive them for their ancestors' actions.
by Jennifer Hobson-Hinsley
I honestly believe people are either born with a sense of direction or without one. You either drive past your own house at night, or you don’t. At birth, I was at the front of the receiving line for a sense of direction, my husband was at the back. My husband drives past our house at night, and it makes me absolutely crazy. Crazy hit a new level when we recently drove from our house in Santa Fe to Telluride, about six hours away.
by Harriet Mills
I had been in Australia for just over two weeks so I was firmly in the relaxed, travel state of mind when my Dad asked me if I wanted to do a skydive over Airlie Beach, the Whitsunday's, and the Great Barrier Reef. It sounded enticing so my straight answer was a prompt yes. This occurred on our first day of five in Airlie Beach and as time progressed my nerves began to rattle me. My sister had always been the daring one, but now I had placed myself in the position where I had to befriend my adventurous side.
Just below the brickwork of the fence line on one of the busiest streets in this enormous city, a fully-grown woman was squatting over the autumn leaves next to a tree that had no hope in hell of disguising her need to go. This was a manoeuvre I had performed myself many times, under the cover of the Australian bush. Never once did I consider I would see it here in the epicenter of Paris.
by Renee King
The chatter of tourists surrounded me and invaded my ears. I tried to block it out, but, truth be told, even my own travel companions were taking up space in my head. I closed my eyes, took slow deliberate breaths, and cleared my mind. When I opened my eyes, a vast white valley spread itself out before me – inviting me to take in its pristine beauty. Towering majestic mountains on either side bookended the sea of ice before me. Awestruck and breathless, I tried to comprehend that I was seeing was nature – raw, unforgiving, awesome for all my senses. As I heard questions from either side of me, I was able to deflect that unwanted noise. I breathed deeply and found something just for me on the Mer de Glace in Chamonix, France.
"For Dad" by Austin Eichelberger
In March, I visited my parents in Virginia from my home in New Mexico: twenty-four full hours of driving over three days and across six states, from desert mesas to grassy flatlands to the wooded Appalachian Mountains where I grew up. I stepped through the kitchen door just as dim night settled over the nearby barn where my mother was feeding horses. My dad, whose name I share, walked toward me smiling but breathing hard, an effect of the lung disease he had been diagnosed with months before. It had already restricted his existence, keeping him from the veterinary work he loved and the active, exuberant lifestyle he had always enjoyed. Watching it happen from over halfway across the country – like snippets of a harrowing home movie, with distance creating a gnawing hunger – was feeding a mix of anxiety and relief within me: anxiety that I'd be too far away to make it home if something happened, relief that I was far enough away to deny the disease’s effects on him.
On a sunny dry day, about an hour before the wedding, it begins to rain; the skies open up, dumping torrents of tropical rain, and I say to the family of the bride, “I’m sorry about the rain.”
“It’s a blessing!” they reply.
An hour later, it’s again sunny and dry, and outside the church on the island of Mindoro in the Philippines, the bride is waiting, dressed in her full wedding gown, inside an air-conditioned van.
“It’s a blessing!”
The groom is waiting outside the church, in the increasing heat; he is spotlessly clean and his hair neatly combed.
by Dorty Nowak After growing up in a family where dinner was eaten off trays in front of the TV, I wanted to create a gracious dining atmosphere in my own home. Lit candles and cloth napkins were the norm, and I combed Good Housekeeping for tips to better the ambience for my family and guests. However, it wasn’t until I moved to Paris that I discovered how little I knew about what truly makes a pleasurable dining experience.
by Nancy King
It was dark at 6 a.m. when I struggled to wake up so I could get ready to sell books. Would anyone care if I showed up or not? I was wondering what difference my books made in the world as I ate a hasty breakfast and drove to the farmer's market. Wishing I were still in my warm bed cuddling my cat, I set up my display and sat down at a table with three other authors, each of us trying to sell books to people as they passed by carrying bags of lettuce, tomatoes, and corn; they were interested in eating, not reading. Was the effort of writing a book worth it?
Just as I was thinking I’d rather sleep than try to sell books, a woman in her early fifties came up to me and said, “I’d like to buy one of your books. Which one do you recommend?”
“Tell me a little about yourself,” I said.
Growing up in a suburb of Washington, D.C., I knew only bits and pieces of my dad’s life in the years before he became my dad.
I knew that both sides of our family came from an orthodox Jewish community in Syria (we ate delicacies like fried kibbehs, stuffed grape leaves and baba ghanoush, long before these foods hit the mainstream, and men sang Arabic songs at the Passover seder).
