Cowboy, Circa 1982
Cowboy, Circa 1982

I thought he was masquerading, even though it was morning and too early for a costume. In my mind, I wondered if he had dressed up the night before, if he went to a costume party where he decided to don the clothes of a cowboy. The bandana looked like he recently pulled it from being wrapped around his neck to cover his nose and mouth, to make him only partially recognizable. It was the early eighties after all, and Village People costumes, the policeman, the construction worker, and the cowboy were still the rage. The thought of this made me want to laugh, to think that this guy hadn't been home since he dressed like the cowboy in the Village People, on his way home from wherever he had spent the night and wanted to pick up a pack of cigarettes.

Read More
Kind of a Funny StoryKristina BuschComment
We Wish You The Best (After We Regret to Inform You)
We Wish You The Best (After We Regret to Inform You)

Dear Aspiring Dancer,

Thank you for auditioning to be in the Nutcracker; we can tell just how far this was out of your comfort zone. We appreciate that when you dance, your arms flail all over the place like palm trees during a Category 5 Hurricane, you maintain a comical lack of flexibility even after four years of attempting to be anything but a human tree branch, and you will not stop talking to your neighbor about the movie Enchanted, no matter how loud we play Tchaikovsky as a sign to tell you to shut up.

Read More
Kind of a Funny StoryKristina Buschcoming of age, Self esteem, growing up Comment
Wardrobe Woes and Other Assorted Misadventures
Wardrobe Woes and Other Assorted Misadventures

Throughout a long and rewarding business career, I have often been asked, How did you get into public relations? Well, it’s kind of a funny story. Or it is now. Today, I can laugh at the litany of misadventures that characterized my first step into the job market. But for years, that innocuous question would hurl me into a flashback traumatic by a young person’s standards.

Read More
Kind of a Funny StoryKristina Buschworkplace, self love, Self esteem Comment
Science and Poetry
Science and Poetry

On the day after Thanksgiving 2022, I dragged my husband to a thrift shop outside Boston to look for a book I'd donated nearly twenty years ago. It started as a Twitter dare the week before. I was chatting with some pals about a book an ex-boyfriend gave me when I was twenty and we were at the height of a love affair that lasted seven years. My ex died in February, and I was having a hard time talking about it; most people didn't seem to understand why I was so upset about the death of a guy I broke up with so long ago. The easiest thing to do, sometimes, was to play it for laughs; at least that way I got to talk about it a little, with strangers who didn't know me well. "Why don't you go look for it?" someone said. "You never know, and it'll be a great story if you find it."

Read More
GriefKristina Buschgrief, loss, relationships Comments
What's Memorable
What's Memorable

My mother’s eyes registered my arrival, but without her dependable smile. The bones of her face were sharp and craggy, her nose slightly humped from a childhood fall, her eyes blue and deeply set. Tita, who cared for her, had dressed her in her brightest blouse and hung a necklace round her neck. Mom was crooked in her chair and not pretending, while a cheerful string of rainbow-colored letters on the mantle shouted happy birthday for her eighty-ninth and last.

Read More
GriefKristina Buschfamily, grief, loss, memories Comments
Coming Back Up
Coming Back Up

“Dear Poo, I’m sorry I’m writing this in a letter, I just couldn’t bring myself to tell you face to face…”

We’d been in our new house just a couple of weeks when my dad—Da—left a letter and, with it, left us. He was gone. And none of us knew what gone meant. Mom couldn’t tell me where he went or why. She called Grandma to try to decipher his note. Whatever sense they made of it wasn’t shared.

Read More
GriefKristina Buschfamily, grief, divorceComment
Hard to Love
Hard to Love

When my ex-husband told me his father was dead, he said it casually. The way you'd mention an alma mater, or that you'd lived abroad for a while.

"My dad died five years ago," he said. We were at work, in a courtroom with no privacy, dressed in our lawyer suits. He reached down to tug up his socks when he said it. I remember searching for significance in how he announced his tragedy while adjusting his outfit. It made me wonder if his father's death was an easy thing to bear. Or if it were so painful he needed to reveal it in the bright bustle of a courtroom, with busied hands. He usually seemed so guarded.

Read More
GriefKristina Buschdeath, family, grief Comment
Trespasser
Trespasser

When I realized that I probably shouldn’t be there, at your funeral, it was too late to leave. I was sitting alone in the center of a cushioned pew halfway back, picking at my cuticles in my lap, too self-conscious among strangers to put my fingers to my mouth and chew. The little chapel was sparsely filled. It seemed I was one of the few who’d found out about the service, or else, perhaps no one was meant to come who had not been asked. When I arrived, I had expected a large crowd to disappear into, or perhaps an old classmate to cling to, but neither were found. I had not gotten in line, to file past where you rested. Instead, I ducked into a pew and sat down, to hide, to gather my thoughts, wonder if I should leave or stay, try to shake off the feeling of a spotlight on my back. Being there felt like some kind of transgression, though I only meant to pay respects.

Read More
GriefKristina BuschDeath, family, relationships Comment
Rising
Rising

On an early evening during our first pandemic winter, I closed my laptop and commuted from my home office upstairs to our kitchen below. Another day of quarantine, another at-home meal to prepare for my family. That afternoon I had kneaded pizza dough and left it to rise inside the corner cabinet, warmed by the heating duct that runs beneath it. Now, the plaid kitchen towel draped over the bowl puffed above the rim, like the fabric below the empire waist of a maternity dress.

Read More
FeastJulia NusbaumFood Writing, Women Writers, Pizza, Family, family issues, Covid-19Comment
I Invite My Mother's Ghost to Lunch at Ikea
I Invite My Mother's Ghost to Lunch at Ikea

I grab a blue-and-yellow rip-stop plastic tote with IKEA repeated up its handles. A worker greets me. Other customers disappear on their way to the ballroom. No thank you. The bag is for show. I don’t need any help. What I came for does not appear in any catalogue. I take the escalator past a miniature farmhouse with its candles, books, and modular kitchen, the promise of all needs met. It recedes below me as a black and white mural of a smiling face invites me further, all the way in. It will be wonderful! The white teeth beckon.

Read More
FeastJulia NusbaumMother and Daughter, Food Writing, Childhood Comments
Not Your Mother's Meatloaf
Not Your Mother's Meatloaf

Tucked between the food-stained pages of my old Betty Crocker cookbook is a handwritten recipe for meatloaf. It’s written on the back of a menu from Gustaf Anders, the Swedish restaurant in Southern California where my stepbrother, John, once waited tables. It was 1992, I think, and John and his Norwegian wife were in the middle of a divorce. Or maybe it had already happened. We were drinking a lot and smoking weed in those days. We had flown back from Norway together, drunk for the entire fourteen hour flight from Oslo to Los Angeles, with a stopover in New York for Customs. I think it was New York; I was in a brownout then. The valium and booze had performed their customary magic. What I remember: putrid green cinderblock walls and men in uniforms. Our bags were screened and some item was questioned and we almost missed the connecting flight. We reeked of Marlboros and sweat and Kahlua. We’d drunk the liquor cart dry.

Read More
FeastJulia Nusbaummother and daughter, family, Childhood, Cooking, Food writing Comment
How to Be Queer in Ten Easy Steps
How to Be Queer in Ten Easy Steps

Step 1: Find a Spot at the Lunch Table

The people I sit with at the middle school lunch table have an unsettling obsession with trying to deep throat bananas. I only have a passing understanding of the concept, and with a gag reflex so strong I sometimes struggle putting in a mouth guard, I don’t participate – or at least, I don’t participate well.

Read More
Julia NusbaumComment
Unchosen
Unchosen

At the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, Béla Károlyi’s star gymnast, Mary Lou Retton, stuck the landing of her full twisting Tsukahara vault, earning a perfect 10.0 and the individual all-around gold medal. At age four, I loved her teammate, Julianne McNamara. She had strawberry blonde hair like me. My sister and I begged my parents to register us for gymnastics. At my first practice, I studied the older girls and followed every direction. At pick up I asked my mom, “Can I come back tomorrow?” 

Read More
Julia Nusbaum Comment
Rebel Without a Date
Rebel Without a Date

For the long first act of my life, as a painfully shy kid growing up in Culver City – steps away from the Sony Pictures studio lot, the iconic Gone With The Wind mansion, which was right by the movie theater downtown, and down the street from the liquor store where they filmed the infamous McLovin scene in Superbad – dating and romance was something I experienced entirely through the silver screen.

Read More
Coming of AgeSelena Raygozalove story, age, datingComment
Filling the Emptiness
Filling the Emptiness

My two young children, clad in neon swimsuits, danced around impatiently in the backyard, checking on the progress every now and then.  Our new inflatable pool—turquoise and gray with an attached blow-up slide—was being filled with the garden hose; it was taking forever for any noticeable progress.  It was mid-June and the Wisconsin weather was in the low 70’s; I wasn’t about to tell my kids that even when the pool had filled to an acceptable volume, the sun still had to heat the water, cold and sputtering from the spigot, and that it was likely to take days, not hours. 

Read More
MotherhoodJulia NusbaumFeminist, mother, Motherhood, parent, wisconsin, childrenComment
Learning Trust, In Lyric
Learning Trust, In Lyric

Suspended above the Delaware River, I can no longer time my contractions. The fierce waves of pain sweep up my facility to do anything but breathe. Breathe I do, with an equally fierce grip on the vinyl door handle of my husband’s pickup truck—never more thankful for its heated leather seats. As my insides constrict, my fingers squeeze the handle tighter. When my muscles release their grip, I release mine, measuring my breath with a will resolute.

Read More
MotherhoodJulia NusbaumMotherhood, Trust, Children, Parenting, ChoicesComment