Twin Cities Daily Planet (https://www.tcdailyplanet.net/author/emilio-degrazia/page/4/)
I remember the moment the lights went on for me in Mr. Meeker’s tenth grade English class. Vickey D., class genius, raised her hand and said that the whitewashed walls in Rolvaag’s novel Giants in the Earth had something to do with Beret’s sex life. And Mr. Meeker said yes, that’s perhaps true. Explain.
Watching crowds watch big ball games in big sports arenas has become one more way for me to feel like an oddball. Spectators now seem required to wear teeshirt uniforms as outward and visible signs of their inward devotion to the team. Now and then it’s possible to spot a deviant in the stands sporting a plaid or polka dot shirt, but deviants seldom cheer or smile. Continue Reading
I’m proud that my sixteen year-old son has chosen to tack a poster of Albert Einstein rather than Elvis or LeBron James on his bedroom wall. Continue Reading
The dogs of war, infamous for feasting on the carnage of battlefields, would be less vile if they did not hound civilians too. Once the dogs are unleashed nobody wants to claim ownership or responsibility for the diseases they spread. Because I entered life in 1941, just months before the Pearl Harbor attack, I was born into the stench of war the noses of those dogs hunger for. Continue Reading
I didn’t have a name for it. On September 11, 2001, I flipped on the TV just as the kids were leaving for school. I saw a plane crash into the World Trade Center. Live? The event, which seemed small on the screen, was not nearly as sensational as an action scene from a Hollywood thriller. As I stood there I drew a blank that left me without a name big enough to cover what I had just seen. Continue Reading
For those who require real proof I have photos and an actual clipping to verify my claim. Yes, until I was four my head was adorned by golden curly locks. I don’t know what happened to those locks when I entered my kindergarten year. My hair turned dark brown like that of my mom and dad, my sisters, and all my cousins, uncles and aunts. My hair began living up to my Ital Continue Reading
I was afraid they’d call and I was afraid of saying no.
They called and I said no.
They had always offered an honorarium, but my saying no had nothing to do with money. Some things are too hard to do.
On the TV screen the images look at once familiar and bizarre. Wide swaths of trash–the wreckage of appliances, houses, cars, furniture–swept along as if by an off-camera bulldozer doing an ordinary day’s work at a landfill without end. There’s a soothing feel to the lava flow rhythm of the trash, as if the monstrous mass has a mind of its own and is in no hurry to get to wherever Continue Reading
It’s an unusual parent who is not alarmed when a daughter calls home from her college dorm to announce that she’s decided to major in unemployment. “Religious studies, Dad. This class I’m taking on Judaism, Christianity and Islam–I can’t get enough of it.”
My mother had simple remedies for all my troubles. “Eat,” she would say. “I fixa da chicka soup to make you good. If you don eat you gonna die. I kill you if I see you wid dat Americano junky food. You eat da soup and go sleep. Domani you feel gooda, ma-sure.”