We held hands, father and I, Saturday nights, as we skipped down 108th Street to the newsstand. We bought the early edition of the Sunday Times and a Hershey bar. How I loved getting drunk off the newsprint, the rank smell of almost-dry ink, the way black bled onto my fingers.
Chocolate, we saved for breakfast. Sunday mornings, as the rest of the house slept, I’d watch my father, paring knife in hand, whittle away at the bar, deep brown shavings falling softly between two slices of Wonder White. I wonder now how I’d never recognized how lucky I was.
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READ MORE 100 WORDS ON LOVE:
100 Words on Love: My Father’s Son
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One of the most popular topics of all time has got to be love and what to do about it.
At The Good Men Project, we have thousands upon thousands of entries on marriage, dating, divorce, single parenting, and more — we even have a weekly social interest group call (currently hosted by Katt Starr) where our members hash out the state of modern love and its intricacies (we have published the recordings here on Medium). Our publication, Hello, Love, is by far and away the most popular publication we run.
It’s easy to understand why. Love is regarded as one of, if not the, most worthy guiding force a person can choose in their life. Having love, searching for and finding love, sharing love — and really, honoring love — has inspired humans to pick up pens and attempt to reveal our tender-most thoughts, in an effort to connect our hearts with others, since the invention of the pen. From odes to epics, from the most agonizing Dear John letters to the sweetest, shortest love notes, we can hardly hold ourselves back from sharing how it feels when we love. In 100 words on love, we present a collection of short essays written by a handful of authors that have worked with The Good Men Project over the years: together, they offer a meditation on this essential aspect of human connection.
Read more from the 100 words on love archive HERE
Diane Gottlieb’s writing appears or is forthcoming in River Teeth, HuffPost, SmokeLong Quarterly, Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, Hippocampus, and 100-Word Story, among other literary journals and anthologies. She is the editor of Awakenings: Stories of Body & Consciousness (ELJ Editions 2023) and the Prose/CNF Editor of Emerge Literary Journal. You can find her at https://dianegottlieb.com and on Twitter @DianeGotAuthor.
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