YOKED

Needles.   There is little else that terrifies me like needles.   I am not sure how or why the phobia began in my life, only that from an early age I have been hysterically fearful of white lab coats, the quick dab of a wet sterilizing pad, tourniquets, and the idea of anything sharper than a pencil nearing me. Before entering sixth grade I was required to complete another dreaded round of childhood immunizations.   My mom knew what an ordeal this could be, how it would take forty minutes to coerce me from the car, and another twenty to pry my white-knuckled hands from the wooden trim running along the walls of the office corridor.   With the hope of avoiding such a scene and relieving me of these anticipatory tears, she simply stopped telling me where we were going.   Or she’d make something else up.   A ‘sale at the neighboring shopping mall’ always seemed to do the trick. Sometimes she would inch me in with little half lies.   “Yes, we are at the doctor, Maggi, but all you h...

I am crazy about this city.   Like an ecstatic love affair, I cannot begin to explain the reasons I am drawn to it, or why I am called to stand amidst its daily ebb and flow.   But I can say this much:   The sound of a taxi blowing its horn revives me.   The constant hum of city traffic soothes my wearied head like a grown-up’s lullaby. There are little Christmas lights everywhere, no matter the season.   They scallop across the Bay Bridge at night and make me feel as though life were a constant holiday. Which, it is. The tall buildings stand like gentle giants around me and under such towering heights I feel safe.   They are a magnificent testament to the achievements of human engineering, yet they remind me of God. I peddle hard on my stationary bicycle, but it is not until I watch an old trolley car roll past that my heart really begins to pound.   It beats with an aching life and feels like a nostalgia that I am knowing for the first time. There is so much to take in here...