Hollis Gillespie
Atlanta magazine's back page columnist
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9/1/2010
Run for your lives!
My friend lary is looking forward to the total breakdown of civil order. “It’s coming,” he’ll say, assembling his rifles. “I see signs of it everywhere.” Knowing this, I realize I should not have told him I got hit by a car last Saturday.
First, let me say I know I should feel lucky to be alive, and maybe one day I’ll get back to feeling that—because that’s my normal state, whether cars have hit me that morning or not. But before I start feeling lucky, I figure I should stop feeling furious.
Because here’s what happened: I was in the middle of a crosswalk, and not the kind of crosswalk with a streetlight where you have to wait for the signal, but the kind you find at corners in residential neighborhoods. The ones where often you’ll see signs reminding drivers it’s the law to stop for pedestrians. I was there, expecting the cars traveling from the north to stop so I could continue to cross, when a car traveling from the south—and from a distance of several blocks, mind you, so it wasn’t a matter of them stopping to let me in, but a matter of them ...
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8/1/2010
Be careful what you cultivate
My mother once told me bitterness would kill me, and I wish she’d explained herself a little—like was this a proclamation or a warning? But she didn’t. She simply said it with no context as I was driving her back from the hospital. “Kid,” she said to me through the cloud of smoke emanating from her Salem menthol, “bitterness will kill you.” Then she opened the door of her Buick Regal and vomited onto the asphalt.
Again, I don’t know why she said it. I wasn’t feeling all that bitter at the time. I was trying with immense effort not to feel anything at the time, attempting instead to bury my panic like an iris bulb at the base of my gut and leave it there—maybe something to be uncovered later. Maybe even by accident. Like the time I was certain the odd mound in my front yard meant that the homeowner before me had buried a pet there, and to prove it I took up a shovel and started digging. I should have known better. There were iris bulbs, tons of them. My neighbor Dolly sidled up to the fence then and mentioned that five hundred years ago, or ...
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7/1/2010
A little weed goes a long way
Some say a weed can’t grow into a tree, but there is a weed growing out from under my neighbor Robert’s house with a trunk the size of my thigh. He should have cut the weed when it was small, but when it comes to his lawn, Robert doesn’t cut much. His yard is so untamed it actually swallows things.
But my girl, for one, likes growth and vegetation. Last year when she was eight, she took a seed from the apple she was eating and planted it in our front yard. Soon after, a green weed grew up in almost the same spot, and she took to believing that was her very tree sprouting. I didn’t tell her it was a weed and let her believe what she believed. I figured she’d lose interest soon enough. I should have known better, because that’s all kids are is interest.
I live on an active intown Atlanta street, with a cement plant five doors down. My front yard is small, consisting of barely two patches divided by a path from the front door to the sidewalk. It’s hard to maneuver a lawn mower in such a confined spot, so, in short, ...
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6/1/2010
My sister won't get her ash out of my car
My cats smell like tobacco again, which can only mean one thing: My sister Cheryl has come to visit. Only to her, “a visit” entails an actual address change, like she is receiving mail at my place now, and receiving incoming calls on my cell phone, and she has commandeered my car as well. She has even—I am not making this up—taken over my actual shoes. In fact, I am considering moving out of my house until she is finished taking it over. I fantasize about having a small, private place to myself—which used to be what I had in my house—with air that isn’t heavy with the smoke from a dozen packs of Pall Malls. But I am only alone for a few minutes until I hear the familiar sound of fingers fumbling for a lighter, because Cheryl can’t sleep if anyone else in the house is awake.
Not that Cheryl smokes in my house. In fact, her many cigarette breaks throughout the day are my only reprieve from her company. She smokes on my front stoop and mistakes my mailbox for her ashtray, and then she comes inside to kiss my cats because she misses the ones she ...
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Writer's Digest "Breakout Author" Hollis
Gillespie is an award-winning humor writer and NPR commentator. Her books
include Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch (the film rights of which were
bought by Paramount), Confessions of a Recovering Slut, and
Trailer Trashed.
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