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I have always loved newspapers. My parents received the New York Times and the Trenton Times every day. The New York Times came in the morning and the Trenton Times came in the afternoon. The Trenton Times had the funnies with my secret crush the Phantom and the obituaries which, as a future storyteller, held a magnetic pull for my need to know things. I watched as my mother and father devoured the daily paper and the Sunday New York Times and grew up with the sense that a newspaper was essential for a civilized life. However, my real, shameful passion was gossip and so I became a reader of the Daily News which chronicled the seamier side of living in New York City. In every city I lived in, Dublin, San Francisco, New York, London, Dallas, Chicago, I read the paper, preferably the tabloid. I also read the alternative press avidly and free neighborhood papers. I’m not sure this habit was consistently edifying but it felt important to stay informed even if I was learning what some movie star ate for breakfast or the fight over a parking space.

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Recently we moved. I am not a stranger to moving. Although my parents lived in our farmhouse for over fifty years, we had several year-long moves during my childhood. London-Dublin-London. We left for a full year on my father’s sabbatical and then bounced back with funny accents, lost friends, and travels all over Europe which marked us as snobs whose dresses were too short. It was the sixties. When I went to college I moved out and never returned. Eighteen, I drove my parents VW Beetle to an apartment. I eschewed the dorm and lived there for a year with almost no furniture and a roommate who could not cook. At all. Anything. Her freezer was stuffed with frozen steaks until she dated a goy, and the steaks ran out. I had the opposite problem dating a nice Jewish boy who wanted to live with me in utter poverty, probably in a teepee. My parents bought an off-campus house, so I stayed behind while he went off to a cooler school. The house was wonderful, and my roommate was a sweet pothead who fixed roofs.

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What is certain? Nearly nothing. Waiting is like purgatory that middle passage corridor I was told was the reason to christen me and give me a name I’ve never used. “Why did you baptize me Mary Ellen?” “Molly isn’t a saint’s name. You’d be a corridor baby.” The image of all these badly named babies, the misspelled and trendy, the nicknames and the silly, fill my brain. All those babies waiting to be allowed to enter a world deeply in need of their newness, their babyish ways, their ability to make adults feel helpless, uncertain, afraid. Love is standing on the edge of a cliff. Waiting hurts our soul. I wait to hear if my sister has died from the injuries experienced from a hit-and-run. She has. I still see that waiting room, her husband standing in the corner shoeless, my father stone faced, heart breaking fluorescent lights, wanting to turn on some innocent minor accident victim and demand to know why they, anyone, is still alive while my shining star has gone dark?

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