Each month, The Sun magazine offers fiction, poetry, essays, interviews, and photos in a black-and-white format without advertising. Each issue includes provocative ideas from people of science, religion, philosophy, the arts, or a combination. Each issue also includes Readers Write, a feature compiling nonfiction submissions from the magazine’s readers on an intentionally broad topic. Occasionally I submit pieces for consideration. More often, I write essays on the topics too late to submit them.

This piece should have been submitted by January 1, 2016, for consideration for the July 2016 issue.

This year marks 50 years since I graduated from high school. One of the buildings that housed the high school back then no longer exists. A grocery store fills that block now. The primary building still exists (see below), but serves a completely different function.

I loved my classes, except for one. Physics. Now I’m not saying I didn’t like physics. I didn’t like my physics class. I never got the chance to discover whether I liked physics.

And that’s because the teacher ignored all the girls. He assigned the boys to seats in the rows closest the window and the girls to seats on the opposite side of the room. And then he talked only to the boys. He didn’t even make it convenient for the girls to daydream by looking out the windows.

If one of the girls raised a hand and asked a question, he’d tell us we didn’t need to know the answer. If we pressed him by asking if there would be a question on a future test, he’d tell us that didn’t matter. We were only going to look for a boy to marry anyway.

The boys loved the guy. Maybe they even learned some physics.

I don’t think any of the girls ever complained to anyone other than one another. We were used to things not being fair by then.

I’m going to my class’s 50th reunion. Maybe I should test out just how much physics those boys learned. Any ideas how I could do that?

Each month, The Sun magazine offers fiction, poetry, essays, interviews, and photos in a black-and-white format without advertising. Each issue includes provocative ideas from people of science, religion, philosophy, the arts, or a combination. Each issue also includes Readers Write, a feature compiling nonfiction submissions from the magazine’s readers on an intentionally broad topic. Occasionally I submit pieces for consideration. More often, I write essays on the topics too late to submit them.

This piece should have been submitted by November 1, 2014, for consideration for the May 2015 issue.

I was ten when my baby brother, Brian, was born. He was the younger of twins my mother hadn’t known she was carrying. Brian was just a tiny bit bigger than his older-by-four-minutes brother, so he was able to get out of the incubator and come home from the hospital first.

Since I was the oldest and already had experience babysitting my younger siblings, I felt possessive of Brian. He was the cutest baby I had ever seen. When his older brother came home, I didn’t even pay attention to him. Brian was the cute one. Bruce was the other one. And because Mom needed help when both babies wanted to be fed at the same time, I fed Brian while Mom fed Bruce.

Brian was my baby.

Because of the difference in our ages, it didn’t take long for me to leave Brian behind in favor of other interests, such as boys my own age. Ten years later, I was ready to leave home while the twins were still in elementary school. I considered them both cute by then, but they were just twerps who happened to share the same living space.

Then in 2010, my brother Brian went to the emergency room after spending a weekend at the lake with his wife and kids because he thought he had come down with a cold. He never left that hospital.

It wasn’t a cold that brought him to the emergency room. It was the early stages of pneumonia brought on by acute myeloid leukemia, AML. In his case, the A could as easily have stood for aggressive as acute because just seven weeks later, Brian was gone.

He made it through one round of chemotherapy, but the remission lasted only two weeks, not long enough for his body to regain strength for him to breathe on his own. And the tube in his throat that permitted the ventilator to keep him breathing had taken away his ability to talk–but not to communicate. He used a board with letters to spell out words. Or he whispered.

During his seven weeks in the hospital, Brian taught me three things through his example. He taught me the importance of saying thank you. He taught me the importance of saying I love you. And he taught me the importance of maintaining a sense of humor.

Brian knew he was dying. He had plenty to complain about, but he didn’t complain. When the nurses came into his room to give him a shot or to take a glucose reading or to change the bedpan, Brian always whispered, “thank you,” before they left the room.

Brian had plenty to be angry about, but he never expressed anger. Whenever someone came to visit him, whether family or friend, whether the visit was one time or every day, Brian always whispered, “I love you,” before we left his room.

Brian couldn’t eat or drink anything. Tubes delivered both food and water. What he wanted most of all was a drink of cold water. And whenever a doctor or nurse asked him if there was anything else they could do for him, he would whisper, “I’d like some water, please.”

I can’t let go of Brian. His name is still in my iPhone directory. When I want to talk with his wife or his daughter, I look up Brian’s name to get the number. I have a folder in my GMail account where I keep all the messages he sent me. It also contains eight messages that arrived several months after he died, the result of someone having hacked his old account. I’ve never opened them, but the previews include statements I can just hear Brian saying, if he ever got his voice back:

“hey Sandra, I told myself to stay positive at first. . .”
“hey there Sandra, I found something that could change how you live. . .”
“hey there Sandra, I wanted to prove I could amount to something. . .”

I will hold on to those messages in order to hold on to Brian.

What are you holding onto?

Each month, The Sun magazine offers fiction, poetry, essays, interviews, and photos in a black-and-white format without advertising. Each issue includes provocative ideas from people of science, religion, philosophy, the arts, or a combination. Each issue also includes Readers Write, a feature compiling nonfiction submissions from the magazine’s readers on an intentionally broad topic. Occasionally I submit pieces for consideration. More often, I write essays on the topics too late to submit them.

This piece should have been submitted by January 1, 2015, for consideration for the July 2015 issue.

Leaving home had been my goal from the time I learned the world was made up of more than one country. Of course, I had to grow up before acting on such thoughts was possible, but even then my parents and I disagreed on just how much growing up was needed.

My first attempt at leaving home was when I applied to a college in the southern half of the state, one where I would have to live in a dorm. I would have considered such an arrangement to meet the definition of leaving home, but my parents insisted that I instead attend a college in town so that I could stay at home.

After one year of college, our next door neighbors moved to Wisconsin, leaving their daughter, Margaret, behind so she could complete college. Margaret was my age, though she attended the other college in town. Her parents rented out the house. Margaret lived in the basement apartment which she shared with a friend from her work. After one year, her roommate decided she wanted to move back home. Margaret asked if I would like to move in with her, rent free. I was convinced my parents would agree. They didn’t.

Another year passed. That summer, I applied as a volunteer with an arts and crafts and recreation program for children in Jersey City, New Jersey. The program wouldn’t pay anything, but they would reimburse my plane fare and provide housing as well as breakfast, lunch, and dinner five days each week. It was only for seven weeks, not exactly leaving home, but my father objected to my going. Fortunately Mom intervened, saying I was over 18 years old so he couldn’t stop me. I think she stretched the truth a bit since I was still under 21. But Dad relented, and I spent the summer living in a house in Union City, with seven other college coeds from the Midwest, and working in nearby Weehawken.

While my excursion in New Jersey lasted only seven weeks that summer, it marked my leaving home more profoundly than my eventual departure. Most of my second grade students that summer were children of Cuban immigrants. And their parents did not all speak English. I had always wanted a career involving foreign languages which led to my studying both German and Russian. But being around my students’ parents, I realized that I already knew a foreign language–English.

When I returned to Minnesota, I remained in my parents home for an additional two years before I left home permanently. I changed my major from German to English and took every English course that didn’t involve reading literature to prepare myself for teaching English as a Foreign Language, a concept I had never thought of before my summer in New Jersey.

It turned out that leaving home wasn’t an event; it was a process that began with a group of seven-year-old children of Cuban origin who helped me recognize I had the knowledge and ability that ignited my passion for teaching English as a language. That was the inciting event that changed the direction I would head for when I finally left home.

Each month, The Sun magazine offers fiction, poetry, essays, interviews, and photos in a black-and-white format without advertising. Each issue includes provocative ideas from people of science, religion, philosophy, the arts, or a combination. Each issue also includes Readers Write, a feature compiling nonfiction submissions from the magazine’s readers on an intentionally broad topic. Occasionally I submit pieces for consideration. More often, I write essays on the topics too late to submit them.

This piece should have been submitted by November 1, 2015, for consideration for the May 2016 issue.

Few fences or hedges separated the backyards of the block I grew up on. That meant our backyard was huge–consisting of many contiguous yards behind our house and those immediately next to it. Clotheslines made up the biggest impediments to our freedom in the backyard. The T-shaped metal supports at the ends of the lines interfered with our football games. And if the lines held clothes, our backyard was off limits. I always knew when there were clothes on the lines; it was my job to hang them up after Mom completed washing each load.

We had an old fashioned wringer washing machine in the basement. In order to save both water and the energy needed to heat it, Mom always washed the light clothes first, the only load that got fresh, hot water. Instead of allowing the water out through the drain in the floor, Mom caught the soapy water in a galvanized tub, to be used with the next load of darker colors or heavier items. Clean, warm water rinsed the clothes before the washer tub spun to get rid of the majority of the water. But to ensure the clothes would dry as quickly as possible, each item went through the wringer to squeeze out the last, reluctant drops before Mom filled the basket with clothes for me to hang outside on the line.

I learned how to pin items on the line with the fewest possible pins by overlapping the edges so one pin held an edge of two items. Once the clothes were dry, I removed every other pin on all the lines so that the clothes remained in place until I moved the basket, into which I would fold and pile the dry clothes, from one end of the line to the other, then repeating the steps with the clothes on the line behind it.

The clothesline represented one of my chores, but it also represented something magical. With a few blankets held in place on the front and back lines, our backyard was transformed into a stage. An older neighbor, Gayle, organized the gaggle of younger kids from our neighborhood to form a circus. We performed for our parents who took seats on the back porch, on the grass, or on folding chairs carried to our backyard for the event. Gayle served as the ringmaster and pulled the front blanket to one side to reveal the performers behind it and then closed the curtain so we could prepare for the next act.

Gayle’s circus inspired me to write a play to raise money for the March of Dimes the following year, also starring my neighbors, the first step on my road to becoming an author.