Issue 471 | The Sun Magazine

March 2015

Readers Write

First Love

A shoebox full of correspondence, a birthday party magician, summer camp

By Our Readers
The Dog-Eared Page

excerpted from
Endless Love

Everything is in its place. The past rests, breathing faintly in the darkness. It no longer holds me as it used to; now I must reach back to touch it.

By Scott Spencer
Sy Safransky's Notebook

March 2015

After being married to Norma for thirty-one years, I still have such sexy dreams about her. This morning I considered waking Norma to finish what my dream Norma had started.

By Sy Safransky
Quotations

Sunbeams

When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth.

Billy, age four, from Breathing Together, edited by Richard Kehl

The Sun Interview

Too Much Of A Good Thing

Daniel E. Lieberman On How Civilization Makes Us Sick

There’s growing attention to the importance of nutrition and physical activity, which is a cause for hope, but my concern is that these trends are very much class driven. Wealthy people tend to be able to afford to be physically active and to eat healthy foods and to reduce stress and to get enough sleep and to stop smoking. There have always been disparities in health between classes, but I worry they are going to widen. Just as we have income inequality, we’re heading toward a world in which we see an increased burden of noninfectious chronic diseases in the lower classes.

By Tracy Frisch
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

There Is No Secret

The peculiar thing about adulthood is that eventually you discover there is no such thing as adulthood. There are only best guesses and increasingly permanent results.

By John Fischer
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Jolene

John and I first met in an aisle of a snack shop run by a blind man named Ray. By the time we got to the register, we were deep in conversation. Ray handed me my change and said, “That guy is smitten with you.”

By C.J. Gall
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Bloodlines

A marriage can be many things. Ours was a series of secrets and small betrayals, little lies that poison you like an odorless gas you don’t even know you’re breathing until you stop.

By Lauren Slater
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

What You Don’t Know For Certain

In the middle of the night there are no answers, not even any suitable questions. Lie dumbstruck in the enormous space of that unknowing. Try to see your part in this. Stand at the mirror and comb through a list of possibilities: not smart enough, not romantic enough. You have known rejection, but its teeth were never this long or this sharp.

By Jim Ringley
Fiction

The Full Eighty-Eight

They were living off Floreta’s pay now. Money was tight, but it had always been that way, forty years of never catching up. If they ever did get a little bit ahead, something always happened: a recession, a car crash, a broken bone, an illness.

By Theresa Williams
Poetry

Abuelita

At the Paso Picacho Campground just after dusk, I walk past a big Mexican / family picnic: everyone chatting & laughing around a long plank table littered / with paper plates & plastic cups & half-empty bottles of Fanta.

By Steve Kowit