Robert Kelsey
Robert Kelsey is a writer who will return home this month to Fort Bragg, California, after seven years in prison.
Tree-Jumper
He told me about his own first “transgression”: fondling a seven-year-old girl; how one thing led to another (he was mostly vague about his crimes) until he finally got caught. How his greatest fear was that he would someday molest his own children, though he didn’t have any yet. The other inmates at Coxsackie had pinned a label on him: “tree-jumper,” a guy who stalks children and hides in bushes or behind trees.
September 1996Listening To My Father
He sat in there re-reading his Marx and Engels, cocooned in a shell, seemingly at peace. Then came the symptoms: a problem holding his knife and fork; a slight slur of speech. The diagnosis was Lou Gehrig’s disease. His life was ending soon.
October 1992Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark? We’d love to hear about it.
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