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Education
David Kemsmier: Scenes From Childhood
Many families possess tales of their occasional flirtations with opulence. Ours concerns Great Grandpa Kemsmier. Short of cash, he decided to sell his small matzoh business. The new management expanded into wines and other kosher delicacies — changing the company name to Manischewitz.
April 1981English Lessons
“Oh.” I couldn’t bring myself to say it — not yet. But she knew I’d understood and continued cheerfully. “Sometime we dig, we find a body — a hand, a foot. One student find pop — then he buried there, too.”
April 1981Sunbeams
October 1980“I can’t believe that,” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said, in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”
“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Iowa Diary
I often feel, in this mixture of silence, isolation, ignorance and pettiness, that if I were struck by a virus, I wouldn’t fight it; I’d give up and implode and disappear. Dangerous signals, those. Not that I will put any effort into taking my life — I feel in large measure that it’s already taken. So I have to leave this place, and fight to get it back.
October 1980Favorite Magazines
Muckraking, infamous mergers, the Jeffersonian ideal
September 1980Fugitives
I arrive late, as usual, paper ends flapping from my briefcase, crumbs clinging to my coat after a crackers-and-cheese lunch between stoplights. Picking my way across the muddy yard from my parking place in a tow-away zone, I glance at the glassed-in central staircase of the high school to check the time.
August 1980Something Does Push The River
David Spangler On Community And Commitment
The Christ is the manifestation of a basketball passing through the table of our universe. It’s a multidimensional event which we are trying to grasp four-dimensionally. We would see it as history, as a succession of events. Which means that the event is still happening. It is not in history, it is history, it is still happening. We are in the midst of it at this moment. I don’t know just where we are along the basketball.
August 1980An Interview With Daphne Athas
From the minute you’re born you somehow know. But the blinders that are put up by society, and by legislated rules, are what people think of as truths. They’re not truths at all. They’re lies. They are confinements compared to the cosmic knowledge that exists.
July 1980
