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The Love Song of Pepper Smith

By Caroline LangstonJanuary 23, 2018

The day of Pepper Smith’s funeral, it was a stiff fifteen degrees—ironic weather for a boy from Gulfport, Mississippi. Pepper was my dear old friend for twenty-three years; we had traversed some odd and complicated decades and had ended up living not far from one another in the D.C. area. We talked all the time,…

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Martha Stewart: Entertaining for Millions

By Caroline LangstonDecember 27, 2017

Quick: before 2017 ends, I want to mark an anniversary that has somehow been missed in the surfeit of commemorations that have rained like confetti all year long on the Internet. We’ve had the twentieth anniversary of Radiohead’s OK Computer, the thirtieth anniversary of the Iran-Contra hearings, and the fortieth anniversary of the July 1977…

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Remembering Father George

By Caroline LangstonNovember 14, 2017

My priest has died. Or rather, in Eastern Orthodox terminology, he has reposed. He has fallen asleep. It’s funny how this death both echoes, and completes, the death of my biological father forty years ago. Throughout my childhood, for years after my father died, nothing irked me like people’s vague references to somebody “passing away.”…

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Bridal Veils and Blessing

By Caroline LangstonOctober 2, 2017

In the back of the closet right, where I’d stowed it years before, I found the wedding veil I’d rescued during the final ransacking of my mother’s house before it was put up for sale. The closet was musty and midsummer-hot, and the cloud of folded tulle spilled off the shelf like a meringue off…

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Remembering 9/11 in Washington D.C.

By Caroline LangstonSeptember 11, 2017

For Scott Simon, and for Bill Craven September 11, 2001 has been one of two signal public events of my adulthood. The other was the inauguration day of President Obama. The minutes and hours of each were suffused with a sense of historical moment: on one, I was a thirtyish new bride; on the other, I…

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Entering the Age of Subtraction

By Caroline LangstonAugust 16, 2017

I am entering the Age of Subtraction. Almost as if there existed an imperceptible fulcrum I had to get over, and I’m now finding myself sliding on the downside. So much of adult life until now was about Addition—collecting experiences and perspectives—countries been to and books read, bands seen—and then a husband and family and…

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The Beautiful Boy

By Caroline LangstonJuly 13, 2017

It’s barely even summer and already, in our house it is the Summer of the Guys. Our son is thirteen now, and in the last few months, the world has opened to him: he and his two best neighborhood friends start planning the day almost as soon as it has started. Freed to stay at…

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Preaching the End of the World

By Caroline LangstonMay 30, 2017

For my husband, Brian Jarboe I learned the news that guitarist Chris Cornell’s death had been declared a suicide on Thursday, May 18—which also happened to be the fourth day in a row I had not managed to get over to the pharmacy to pick up my antidepressant prescription. Which meant that I had not…

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Pascha, the Resurrection, and Ricky Gervais

By Caroline LangstonMay 3, 2017

Rays of midmorning sun shone through the window and fell in molten pools across the white sheets of our bed. Lying back on my two feather pillows, I could hear and smell the burgeoning sounds of spring through my open windows—birds chirping, the scent of sweet olive, the soft susurration of car wheels on the…

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Share If You Agree

By Caroline LangstonMarch 30, 2017

I have had it with the rage. It might drive me off social media. At first, I thought it might just be a problem of living in metropolitan Washington, D.C., where the strident opinions held by many are usually interlinked with what they do for a living. No such luck, though: I’ve been on trips…

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