Nicki Chen's Blog, page 5

Dressing Down—When Did We Become So Casual?

The Dry Cleaners I hadn’t been to the dry cleaners for three, maybe four years. But after serving messy desserts to my guests on the buffet, the silk table runner came away badly stained. So, the other day I took it to the dry cleaners. While Mr. Kim was writing up my order, I commented […]

The Toyota Shuttle: A Very Unpleasant Ride

I’m not blaming Toyota. They did a good job servicing my car. They changed the oil and the brake fluid. Their seating area was large and comfortable. It had coffee, water, and TV. It was going to take a couple of hours to do the diagnostic test, though. So I decided to take the shuttle […]

The Greatest Generation & My Dad

This year is the 8oth anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. Maybe you saw films from that day re-played—the soldiers pouring out of their landing crafts, wading ashore under heavy fire from gun emplacements on the cliffs. It wasn’t just a few brave men but tens of thousands of […]

A Story about Power & Crime

This is a story about power. A story about a man of power and the crime he commits. It’s also a story about his enablers—his subordinates and their wives. Even the police. And there’s more: a dear old friend and her daughter, some sex, some alcohol. Mainly, though, it’s a story about the man’s wife. […]

Sailing across the Sea for Pizza

It started with the flyer someone left on my doorstep for a pizzeria in another town. Why, I wondered, would anyone think I’d want to take a ferry across to Kingston just to eat pizza? We have good pizza places here in Edmonds. I could easily pick up my phone and have some delivered. And […]

My Mom Was a Telephone Operator

After graduating from high school, my mom worked for a short time as an old-fashioned telephone operator—a job that no longer exists. Before long, she left that job for something that suited her better. A Tinter of Black & White Photographs She found work at a photography studio doing another job that no longer exists. […]

Truth & Beauty

“Beauty is truth, truth is beauty,” –that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know. John Keets For as long as I can remember, I loved and appreciated beauty. Maybe that came from my mom and grandma who were both beauty-lovers and amateur artists. On the other hand, doesn’t everyone love […]

The Other Story

The Pool at Piula In a previous post, “Finding Support in a Lonely Endeavor,” I wrote about submitting two stories to a journal at the local college. I’d recently moved to a new town, and I thought that would be a good way to meet other writers. I shared one of those stories, A Blind […]

Scammed in Suva

It was 1992. A more innocent time. Especially if you lived in a peaceful, South Pacific island country like Vanuatu. The capital, Port Vila, had only one small weekly newspaper. And when I say small, I mean only four pages long and printed on paper slightly larger than a legal pad. In 1992, we weren’t […]

Beauty Everywhere … Noticing It

Long ago, when we lived in the Philippines, I was considering writing children’s books. So I sent away for a correspondence course. The books arrived, and I got busy working on my lessons while I waited to drive my youngest daughter home from kindergarten. I finished the course and received my certificate, but I never […]