Category Archives: Diversions

The stuff that didn’t fit elsewhere.

Screen time

Goodbye, Bristows

I started watching “Alias” in its first season, in 2001. The year we graduated college, got married and moved to Missouri. The year I started my first “real” job. I watched the last episode tonight with some friends under a strict no talking, no mocking rule (which they violated, repeatedly) that I instituted because I know the show has been awful for at least two seasons and that it’s infinitely mockable. But I wanted to stick it out. And I’m glad I did.

My friends asked a few times during the finale if I was going to cry. I didn’t … during the show. I was glad everyone cleared out so quickly after the closing credits, which included the phrase “Thank you for an incredible five years.” It sort of brought home the fact that we’re leaving in less than two months. I’ve grown to love this place and these people so much, and it’s almost over. And there won’t be a nice, soft-focus end to our story. We’ll move, and things here will carry on. We’ll carry on.

So yes, Amy, B and Rachel, I did cry when “Alias” ended. But it wasn’t because I’m going to miss the Family Bristow. It’s because I’m going to miss you and here and this time of my life.

Reading

"At Twenty-Eight"

American Life in Poetry: Column 059

By Ted Kooser
U.S. poet laureate

Contrary to the glamorized accounts we often read about the lives of single women, Amy Fleury, a native of Kansas, presents us with a realistic, affirmative picture. Her poem playfully presents her life as serendipitous, yet she doesn’t shy away from acknowledging loneliness.

At Twenty-Eight

It seems I get by on more luck than sense,
not the kind brought on by knuckle to wood,
breath on dice, or pennies found in the mud.
I shimmy and slip by on pure fool chance.
At turns charmed and cursed, a girl knows romance
as coffee, red wine, and books; solitude
she counts as daylight virtue and muted
evenings, the inventory of absence.
But this is no sorry spinster story,
just the way days string together a life.
Sometimes I eat soup right out of the pan.
Sometimes I don’t care if I will marry.
I dance in my kitchen on Friday nights,
singing like only a lucky girl can.

“At Twenty-Eight” by Amy Fleury is reprinted from “Beautiful Trouble,” Southern Illinois University Press, 2004, by permission of the author. The poem was originally published in Southern Poetry Review, Volume 41:2, Fall/Winter 2002. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.