Culture

Losing Julia

Joseph Souza

This is a Julia Child story.

Actually, this is a story about how boy meets Julia Child, and then loses her.

Every so often in our lives we come across a celebrity or VIP, and in these brief, fleeting moments we are struck with the inextricable urge to bask in the reflective glow of their fame. Maybe this urge reflects our primeval need for affirmation, attention, like the ancient Greeks and their pecking order of gods. Demeter the barley mother, sitting on Mount Olympus next to Julia, the butter mother.

This was the position I found in myself in twenty odd years ago. I was in my early twenties. It was the eighties and I was a college student at a nearby university. A commuter from the burbs, I had a part-time job at a lobster pound on Boston's gritty Fish Pier, and it was the most difficult work I'd ever done. The streets surrounding the docks were dangerous and sometimes seedy. The Portuguese fishmongers toiling across the street were maniacal sociopaths capable of any number of violent crimes. Strange and eccentric characters abounded, most notably criminals and small-time hoods. And this was smack dab in the Whitey Bulger era, when he ran his rackets from inside Triple O's, located a short distance away.
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Politics

Cats

Terry Sanville

"We'll start her on three units of ProZinc, twice a day," the young vet told us. "Bring her back in a week and we'll do another glucose curve." She looked worried.

I petted our skinny little cat and she purred immediately, grateful to escape the brutes that had been jabbing needles in her veins all day. My wife and I moved to the animal clinic's front counter to pay our bill - a day's worth of blood sugar tests, a vial of insulin, syringes.

"Holy mother of..."

As I gazed at the computer-printed bill, the receptionist flashed a weak smile and said wryly, "It is what it is..."

Yikes!
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Fiction

Altogether Fitting and Proper

Noah Milligan

Election night. I hadn't slept in days, felt jittery from the four Red Bulls I had already chugged, the fifth in my hand, and paced from the east to the west wall at the Skirvin Centennial Ballroom in Oklahoma City, eyes locked on the projection screen and the eight-feet-tall Wolf Blitzer as he read off exit poll numbers. The younger demographic-eighteen to twenty-four with zero to some college education-overwhelmingly voted for the President. Big surprise, they're naive. Idealistic. But the older and more educated voted for Oklahoma Governor Jacob Koch. Too bad the majority of Americans didn't have a college diploma. Hell, I would've settled for only having an educated majority in swing states.

Red, white, and blue balloons waited to be dropped from the ceiling, cameras scanned the ballroom from every corner, anchormen and women conducted interviews with guests and Governor Koch's staffers, women wore their hair up and dressed in sequin gowns, men walked around in ill-fitting rented tuxedos, champagne, secret service, laughter, overpriced and nauseating perfume, roast beef, diamonds, an ice sculpture of Lady Liberty. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. I can remember every presidential election since I was eight years old the same way other guys my age remember their first car or the first time they felt up a girl. When Clinton had beaten H. W., I had worn my horsey pajamas and had sat cross-legged in between my dad's legs, wondering why in the hell did Bush always sound like he had a sinus infection. Did he refuse to take allergy medicine? Why would you want a president who sounded like he spoke out of a kazoo? The whole spectacle of politics fascinated me. By the time I had turned nine years old, I had memorized the Gettysburg Address: Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
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