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Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories
American Cheese
American cheese on white bread. Dry and joyless. Wholly unsatisfying yet, as a bus station refreshment, wholly appropriate. The bread is without flavor or soul, edible foam rubber, hardly the staff of life. The cheese is mostly chemical. But we are far from the farm.
June 1974The Politics Of Food
It’s very difficult for me to write about food — so many trips and so much worry, joy, and compulsion. My first impulse is to go into a Yiddish tragic-comedy about the whole thing, but not now. My second impulse is to go into a long talk about all the changes in my own feelings and habits surrounding food, but that doesn’t seem right either.
June 1974What Money Can’t Buy
In order to come together with people that share common interests, we have traveled around the U.S. for the last five months, hitchhiking with very little or no money and carrying only what we could stuff into our pockets. We shared with many people.
May 1974The Chapel Hill Syndrome
I’m not down on Chapel Hill. With me it’s a matter of finding out that I don’t have to live there in order to be up. I have not always felt this way. In fact, I had a bad case of what I call the Chapel Hill Syndrome.
May 1974The Traveler Returns: Home, More Or Less, At Last
Going home, as if home were still a possibility, or, like those other shadowy and relative values of our age — love, honesty, rationality — nothing more than a momentary echo of something past, and nearly forgotten, a smudge on the map, a torn page from the history book, when families stayed put, when the heart was forever, when politicians were statesmen, when faith was an arbiter at the edge of learning rather than a substitute for reason.
May 1974The Music And The Masses
And so it was pronounced: there would be a gathering of the multitude, and musicians would play and fireworks would light the sky. The people were joyous, for they had just beheld the resignation of a powerful leader who had sought to rule through discrediting these free people. A note of justice was to be heard through the festival.
May 1974Dear Charlotte, It’s Hard To Know What To Say . . .
I think I’d rather talk about Charlotte. North Carolina, that is. I really can’t be objective about Chapel Hill, and my subjectivity is too complex to put into words. But Charlotte! There’s a town I can write about cause I really don’t like that city. I can’t quite put my finger on it, you know, because it would take half my hand to really cover it all.
May 1974A Child Tonight
I wanted to touch him, hold him and laugh with him, show him something — just one thing — good about the world, but I couldn’t think of anything just then. I wanted to fold his mother into me, whoever she was, and love her, build for myself and these two people I didn’t even know a world where laughter and gentleness is possible, not distorted.
May 1974Learning To Love
Living with and loving kids who never got an even break. I put aside the idea of climbing the mountain together. I read case histories and wonder if I could make even a small impression. Could they learn to love me as I love them? Could they begin to love our brothers and sisters as well? Is it even possible that they could learn to love parents; foster-parents; judges; probation officers; and policemen, who, in their own weakness, do the children so much wrong?
May 1974On The Other Hand
So many people have so many good things to say about Chapel Hill, we thought we’d ask some folks what they don’t like about it. A sample of public opinion:
“The casual village atmosphere has become a casual rip-off atmosphere.”
“I don’t like the cars on Franklin Street. Close it off and plant flower gardens on the asphalt.”
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