Susan Browne's Blog
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Nov.24.2008
A few years back, my husband Kenneth put a ban on hair-talk. He was right. I talked way too much about it for awhile. About five years of a while.
I could not get the right haircut. The basic problem: I don't want to spend much time fixing my hair anymore. But I have the type of hair that...
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Nov.20.2008
Loneliness took me on many journeys. Thoreau wrote: "Men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after."
So in the middle of December, after I finished my classes and quit my job, I drove to Colorado with a man I had only known for two weeks and married...
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Nov.17.2008
A few weeks ago, my wireless connection stopped working. The router was "unavailable," or so the little red hat said in the tool bar on the lower edge of the screen. The little hat is green when the router is available. My husband Kenneth and I discussed it all at great length, he...
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Nov.15.2008
Back in Chico, Jack and I rent a house and fight in it. Jack isn't much of a fighter, but I can cause enough conflict for both of us. The central argument: money. So Jack gets a job, bartending at another restaurant, not La Salles. I'm now working there again, feeling like I've failed, gone...
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Nov.14.2008
That night, after we went to bed, Jack found out how sick I really was. I woke up sweating, my head splitting with pain. Jack took my temperature, 104. He drove me to the hospital. There I finally found out what was going on: I had a pelvic inflammatory disease, caused by the IUD that had been...
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4 comments
Nov.13.2008
Jack and I decided to move to Santa Barbara. It was more my idea than his. It was completely my idea. I wanted to get back to my roots, the beach. I wanted a change. I wanted to stop working in a bar, waitressing. My temper was showing. About a month before this decision to move to Santa...
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Nov.12.2008
About a year after I divorced my first husband, I met Jack. I was working in what was called a "fern bar" in Chico. La Salles was designed after Henry Africa's in San Francisco. Henry Africa revolutionized the bar business with flowers and ferns and swanky wallpaper. It was not your...
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Nov.10.2008
We're moving toward the darkest day of the year. That's what I always think around this time, the second week of November. We're moving toward Thanksgiving, a holiday I used to dread like I dreaded Christmas.
I no longer shudder in expectation of the holidays. Kenneth and I make the dinner for...
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Nov.08.2008
Yesterday, I went for a six mile walk/run around the Lafayette Reservoir. It is such a beautiful, peaceful place, set between the rolling hills of the East Bay. I first started jogging around the reservoir in 1984 when I moved back to the Bay Area from Chico and started teaching at Diablo Valley...
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Nov.07.2008
My first memory is of drowning. I was about three years old, the story goes. I wasn't old enough to know how old I was, but I remember what happened.
We lived in Long Beach, California, and my mother took my older sister and me to the beach nearly every day. I didn't know how to swim yet, but I...
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Nov.06.2008
One of my students once said to me, "Ms. Browne, you are the youngest person I know." He was twenty at the time, and I was thirty-five. So I guess I was fairly young, but he didn't mean that kind of young. His statement actually confused me, but I took it as a compliment, because I...
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Nov.05.2008
Today is a great day. Barack Obama is President Elect of the United States. I'm in love with my country again. Last night, over a million people stood in Grant Park in Chicago waiting to see Obama: that said it all. And Obama's acceptance speech was fantastic. He is beautiful to listen to. He...
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Nov.04.2008
What is my job in life? What is the work I'm supposed to be doing? First of all, "supposed to be doing," is a tricky phrase. I don't know if I believe I'm "supposed" to be doing anything in particular. However, like a flower perfumes the world or a bird sings, (and not always...
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Oct.31.2008
The plane is packed. The overhead bins are full. The woman next to me is coughing her lungs out. Great. I get to sit for nine hours next to someone with the flu or walking (flying) pneumonia. I snap on my seat belt, which is so ludicrous. That seat belt is really going to help when we're...
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Oct.30.2008
It's unnatural to fly in a plane for sixteen hours. Highly. Pun. But true.
When I'm asked, "How was your flight?" I say, "Good. We didn't die."
I don't understand planes. The laws of aerodynamics have been explained to me many times in great detail, but it remains an...
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About Susan
Born in Long Beach, California, Susan Browne has lived most of her life in the Bay Area. Her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Subtropics, River City, The Mississippi Review, Gargoyle, Margie, American Life in Poetry, and other literary journals and...
Connections
Causes Susan Browne Supports
Unicef
Amnesty International
Run Together, A Race to Raise Money for Leukemia and Lymphoma Society