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Why Wouldn’t I Be Fine?

By Lindsey CrittendenOctober 4, 2018

“You OK?” my husband Craig touches my hand, looks at me. We’re in the car, Sunday evening, driving home. Something shifts inside me, like sand. This experience of having him check in with me is new. After almost fifty years of practice, I’m so used to saying fine that I don’t always feel what I’m…

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Passing the Possibility of Parenthood

By Lindsey CrittendenMay 18, 2016

Early one recent morning, I’m still half-asleep. The cat lies curled up between Craig and me, and when my leg moves against her, she snarls. “Hey, now, little one,” he says, bending his face down to her and scratching her softly behind the neck. “That’s not the way to act, is it?” In my sleepy…

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The Helicopter Has Landed

By Lindsey CrittendenApril 10, 2012

What’s wrong with this picture? A Sunday afternoon in March, sun breaking through the clouds and casting onto the wall. Last week’s roast chicken simmering into stock on the stove. Craig at his desk, typing up the selection for lectio divina at the weekly meeting of our Benedictine group. My nephew in a club chair,…

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Near Miss

By Lindsey CrittendenDecember 19, 2011

[Note: This post contains a spoiler for the film Melancholia in the last paragraph.] Sometimes it sidles up to you, out of the corner of your eye. You catch a glimpse and turn your head: Was that it? Nah. Like a mouse scurrying around that we don’t accept as an actual rodent until the fifth…

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Unplugging

By Lindsey CrittendenNovember 30, 2011

For months, my laptop has been quitting suddenly, flashing inscrutable error messages, and not allowing me to back up. I can be a sudden, spontaneous shopper—especially in the months leading up to my wedding—for shoes, soft sweaters, and a gorgeous silk kimono. But for items requiring a power switch and a price exceeding three digits?…

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Back to School

By Lindsey CrittendenNovember 4, 2011

When I was a freshman at UC Berkeley, I took a yearlong Western Civ. class. We began with the ancient Greeks and ended somewhere after Freud. (I probably kept that syllabus, the way I keep everything, but where?) Of all that I read and wrote about that year, here’s one sentence that has stuck with…

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Daring and Foolishness

By Lindsey CrittendenSeptember 20, 2011

Back in June, on the feast of Pentecost, in the chapel at the Bishop’s Ranch, instead of a Psalm, we read a poem called “tongues-talk,” based on Acts 2:1-35. The poem placed recognizable, familiar words placed together in a way that created more of wash of sensation than clear meaning. What to do with a…

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Amy, David, and My Brother

By Lindsey CrittendenAugust 11, 2011

It’s the first thing most people have said. She was so young. Amy Winehouse was so young. I’ve had only a handful of conversations about Winehouse since her death—over dinner with movie group, at the hair salon—but they’ve followed a pattern. A brief bit about the cause of death—how could it not have been drug-related?—and…

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To Learn Is To Stay Alive

By Lindsey CrittendenJune 30, 2011

In the fall of 2006, I enrolled in a class I’d thought about taking for years. This class—a four-year program called Education for Ministry, administered by the graduate theology school at the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee, and held in Episcopal parishes nationwide—demanded three hours of seminar each week during the academic year,…

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I’m Sorry. Aren’t I?

By Lindsey CrittendenJune 14, 2011

It’s a simple thing: we do wrong, and we apologize. Simple, yes, but not always easy. Indeed, the very ease of an apology can often signal its insincerity or glibness. Too many apologies are more about saving face, about getting out of the hot seat. For years, I’ve known how it feels to receive those…

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