“Needing a time-out from marriage and my career, a do-over, I had volunteered for the United Nations mission. Actually, it wasn’t a new idea. In the heady days of my youth, I had been accepted to the Peace Corps after college and assigned to go to Afghanistan but chose, instead, to marry my boyfriend to keep him out of the Vietnam War draft. Chickened out, not chose, I corrected myself. Everyone who came back from Afghanistan in the late 1960s had Giardia, the almost incurable, wicked kind of intestinal parasites that colonize and reproduce in the small intestines. Why commit gastro-suicide? And with an undergraduate degree in Soviet government, there wasn’t a wide choice of jobs. I didn’t have the thighs to be a cocktail waitress and my math skills were so bad that I couldn’t even get a job as a drive-thru bank teller. Besides, getting married was what you did back then. You didn’t need to be a hero; that’s what husbands were for.”
The Fourth Moment, due out in print this November, is neither a novel and nor a standard memoir. Rather, it is a collection of exuberant and painful, regretful and enlightening, moments in my life that I hope will encourage you to share the moments in your own life. Find out more about it by going to https://cjgarrison.com/
Carole J. Garrison 