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
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
HELEN WHYBROW
A bird is not born knowing how to fly. Not exactly. Leaping off a rafter and opening two perfectly constructed aerodynamic wings will get a fledgling only so far—usually to another rafter, or a spot on the ground, or sometimes to a confusing corner of a window where an invisible cobweb will wrap
DAN CHIASSON
Burlington’s first public Xerox machines were located in the basement of Capitol Stationers on Church Street. Upstairs, schoolchildren roamed the aisles for markers, sparkle and glue. Downstairs, at the copiers, metalheads ran off posters for their bands and teenagers occasionally xeroxed their bare asses.
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