The Cape May-Lewes ferry runs across the Delaware Bay, connecting Southern Delaware to Southern New Jersey. I was ten years old when my dad suggested we take a spontaneous, family day trip. We weren’t visiting New Jersey, we were just going to ride the ferry there and back. A seemingly harmless family activity – except…
Author: A. Gannon
Delaware native turned Brooklynite by way of a three year stint as an expat in North and West Africa, searching for humor and meaning in life and writing about it.
lucille du lyon
On a metro platform with my backpack and two carry-on bags scattered around me, I watched Lucille gracefully roll a cigarette, using the tobacco package balanced on her left forearm as a surface while the nimble, practiced fingers of her right hand did the fast work. She looked at me with bright eyes and spoke…
the importance of “compreesh”
When I’m wrapping up a lesson or concept in class, I ask my students, “Est-ce clair?” Is it clear? “Oui, Madame!” they shout back in unison. More often than not there’s one goofball student who responds with, “Yes Madame! I compreesh!” Volunteers hear this all the time: compreesh. It’s an English oops, a Franglais fail, that I…
a day in the life of a white princess
4:30am: I wake up with the same stomachache I went to bed with and run to the latrine. It’s pretty cold outside – harmattan is here. I go back to bed, wrapped in the fleece blanket I stole from the plane over a year ago. 6:30am: I wake up again to the sound of the ground…
the skirt
For the first time in my life, funerals make sense. Not that I’ve endured many funerals in all my twenty-seven years but I’ve been to enough to question their existence. For the obvious reasons that I suppose anyone does – they’re boring, expensive, sometimes insincere, but mostly, depressing. Funerals are a drag. Don’t get me…
stars and violins
Days before I began my first visit to Morocco, I found myself in Brooklyn, wandering around Bed-Stuy in the fall and hating every first-world minute of it. Growing up on the East Coast put New York on my radar as a potential future home at a pretty early age. I think that’s typical for anyone…
the painter
A year ago, when I arrived at Morocco’s hidden gem, Chefchaouen, I was halfway through a month-long, solo trip from Morocco to France. I took a bus from the capital city, Rabat, that was full of backpackers who, despite the fact that they were mostly just looking to get stoned in the mountains, all seemed…
biking through butterflies
I learned to bike when I was 26 years old on a bumpy, sandy road in Sub-Sahara Africa surrounded by butterflies. That’s the short version. The poetic version. The sarcastic version. It was a solo trip from Bouca – the rural village in Benin where I was serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer – to…
biking through butterflies 