An archive of all of the personal essays we’ve published at Hippocampus Magazine over the years.
We lived, my grandmother and I, next to the line that separated white from black. There was, in that time and place, no legitimate mixing of the societies. If I looked west from my yard along Bay Street, I could see the black side of Mullins, but I could never go there and had little reason to look. My life was on this side.
… So ran the 1988 TV commercial for Time-Life Books’ Mysteries of the Unknown series—something I always associate with my first time. I was 9. And by “first time”, of course, I mean the first time that crippling panic consumed me. After seeing that ad, I couldn’t sleep for months.
The boxes are sitting on my Seattle steps, bright white against the dark, mildew-stained stairs. I heft them up; they’re surprisingly heavy. I elbow my way inside the front door and drop them on the table with a thump. The red and blue lettering reveals nothing about what’s inside, though I have my suspicions.
I piled everything into a boxy folding cart, the kind only New Yorkers use because we don’t have cars to haul junk in, and pushed it to Goodwill, around the corner on Second Avenue. It was my seventh trip that week.
I was gazing out at Provincetown Bay through the enormous picture window in Norman Mailer’s home. Betty Friedan’s classic analysis, The Feminine Mystique, sat open on my lap. Jessica, an administrator of the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, entered through the patio door, bringing in the chilly fall air and the news that Norris Church Mailer had died.
When I arrived at the Army Induction Center in 1954, I was required to fill out a form so that my dog tags could be punched out. Among the information to be included, beyond name and serial number, was religious orientation. The choices were Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or None. I chose the last.
I read a passage, but I did not read it. Words entered and passed against the hardened nerves of a paralyzed brain. Trembling, trembling. Shriveled, calloused and jaded, the nerves registered nothing, transported no phrases through epic distances, and deciphered no code.
I live less than a mile away from my childhood home. It would take me about three minutes to get in my car and drive to my old street. On a nice day, I can walk there in less than fifteen.
The first time I kissed a girl, it all happened—the way defining events sometimes do—at four in the morning. We were in a student room the size of a large packing crate facing on to what might have been Oxford’s most modern and least lovely quadrangle.
When I was a baby, my thighs were so chubby that one of my aunts used to eat them like drumsticks. It’s a story I heard often when I was growing up, usually told with the requisite giggles from my mother and a pinch on my legs from whomever else was within reach.
