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Marriage
Facing Fear
Footsteps. Coming from behind us, coming up on the back of the tent. They came steadily and quickly. One, then another, and a third. A twig snapped under the weight of one step. (How melodramatic, something in me thought.) Another step. They were heavy and man-like, not soft and meditated like those of a cat. Human steps. Stopping almost right on top of us.
January 1978Another Appetite
It is April and the cold wind shears through Spring, sharp and strident, cutting away the warmth that had been nuzzling the earth. The daffodils have been shredded and the azaleas’ fragile blooms are scissored to limp bits of faded rag.
May 1977Freedom And Other Prisons
There are many prisons — illness, poverty, insanity. Life itself. We create our own realities; if we bleed for one another, so must we laugh. But it’s no less the prison for our having laid the brick.
November 1976Alternate Styles, One Life
To begin with, I don’t believe in alternate life styles. Having lived communally, having been married, having lived alone, it all comes down to the same thing: you live, ultimately, with yourself.
September 1975The Marriage
Summer in College Town. At 7:30 a.m. eating a bagel with cream cheese at Out To Lunch they discuss getting married. At 5:30 p.m. the same day they are in a lawyer’s office in Raleigh writing their marriage contract.
April 1975The 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 1974
