During this holiday week, The Common is presenting highlights from the past year. Today’s highlights come from “Essays.”
James Boo takes us on a visit to the Park Slope Coop, while Deborah Thompson trades one piece of history for another in a thrift store.
Photo from Flickr Creative Commons
NATALIE LINH BOLDERSTON
Whenever my mother gives me one of her stories, I watch her cut into it, lay it out for me in a way I can consume, in a way she can bear. Her stories simmer in her muscles, ready to emerge at a flick of her wrist, a familiar flare of joy or pain.
RO SKELTON
For the displaced, dispossessed, or plain bored, this modest boutique, with its rows of canned foods, cellophane slips of hair weave, and single cigarettes, became a place for all of us to call home.
AIMEE LIU
For years when I was growing up, my mother created annual family albums at Christmastime, and she often had to resort to shots of her garden or floral arrangements for lack of human portraits. The pictures she took of people were usually out of focus. And my cameraman father was notorious for standing so far
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