Exit Only
“Because once you depart from this one-way road of life, there is just no getting back on.”
Gettin’ Through the Dog Days
We sit just now smack in the middle of the broad flat belly of summer, and everywhere you go, you see babies in nothing but diapers, curling and extending their fat bare toes heavenward, letting a thin line of baby-drool slide down their bare tummies. Happy those babies look; cool too.
Schooled, at the ER
Here’s a memory from a freezing winter night in the Time Before. It describes the time I spent in a big-city ER, where, three hours after being ushered past Registration into the vast inner rooms, my main thought was, “Where do I sit?”
The Best Reunions
After a while in life, you start noticing that there are only so many faces in the world, which causes people’s identities to really blur in the mind. Someone spoke to me in the supermarket yesterday and it took me three whole aisles to realize it wasn’t Bette Midler at all but some girl I had sat behind for four years in homeroom.
Kitchen Wars
Last night, I cooked a whole and actual chicken, which is a huge deal for most of us nowadays when we can all buy the little guys freshly roasted and still warm inside their plastic swaddling clothes.
Just Talk to Folks, or Lessons From the Field
…So back the students waded again, into the great democratic tide, to look and be looked at, to address and be addressed, to feel themselves a part of this rich common life - all but three girls, walking close behind me.
Just ahead of us on the sidewalk sat a badly twisted man in a wheelchair, the panhandler’s traditional coffee-can clutched in one bare and wind-stung hand. “This is too hard for them,” I thought. But suddenly, the girl most recently fretting over her shyness veered to stand before him.
“How’s it goin’?” she called cheerfully to the man. “Can we bring you some coffee? We’re just going to get some….”
Beautiful Thought
Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars
Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp
Lean Back
Daylight Savings began a good while ago now – as if you could ever save such a thing as daylight, or delay for even a second the spilling bright silk of it. We change the clocks because we can’t change time. We borrow light from day’s end to paste onto its beginning. The days grow short and shorter still. Rename their hours, run them backwards, stand them on their heads if you like, there’s no changing that fact.
Scary Stuff!
It was late on a Friday at the discount drug, the right kind of night for conversation between a lone clerk and her one customer, me.
I had pointed to the cover photo of a fall magazine displayed on the counter.
Written Last Fall - for 50th Reunion Book
To give a full account of myself, the story has to go way back, to when my big sister Nan, our single-parent mom and I lived, together with a sheltering layer of three old folks, in a place where an actual lamplighter made his nightly rounds, and a tiny old man in a cap pushed a wagon crying, “Ra-a-a-a-gs! Bring out your rags!”
Saga of the Sad Old Bathrooms
Our bathrooms dated back to the 1940s, which meant the strangely off-plumb sinks stood on skinny metal legs and were topped by medicine cabinets the size of cereal boxes. Their potholder-size wall tiles were ancient rectangles.