Issue 490 | The Sun Magazine

October 2016

Readers Write

Restaurants

Two grenades, the NAACP, a changed man at the farmers’ table

By Our Readers
The Dog-Eared Page

The Optimism Of Uncertainty

There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.

By Howard Zinn
Quotations

Sunbeams

They say love inspires. Guess what inspires more? An enemy.

Donna Lynn Hope

The Sun Interview

An Unlikely Friendship

An Israeli And A Palestinian Make The Case For Peace

Do not give up hope. Despite the Holocaust there is now a German ambassador in Israel, and an Israeli ambassador in Berlin. Fortunately the Palestinians didn’t kill 6 million Israelis, and the Israelis didn’t kill 6 million Palestinians. There is hope that we can reconcile, too.

By Judith Hertog
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

A Good Daughter

But what daughter wouldn’t be unnerved by such foreshadowings of the time when her mother won’t be able to take care of herself; when she will have to be cooked for, spoon-fed, helped out of bed, cleaned in the most private of ways? You want your mother to be there to take care of you, to wipe away a smudge with her spit, to make you dinner, to catch you before you fall.

By Amber Burke
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Dry Season

Tell me how to do it, Father. All of it, I mean. How to be a better fisherman, a better man, a better being on the earth. How to say a grateful prayer for the silver fish given, how to open my two hands and let go of whatever darkness I have gathered.

By Joe Wilkins
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Embarrassed To Be An American

A Diary Of My Presidential Campaign

July 31
I am the only Presidential candidate to demand the release of the POWs from the War on Drugs.

By Sparrow
Fiction

Whatever Day It Is

My tester asks me to take a seat in the waiting room while she reviews my score. She wants to see if I have missed anything. I want to tell her I missed my fifties, skipped that whole section of my life, lived anesthetized for a decade, ten years on autopilot — years you think will continue to replicate themselves, dull and identical, until you die. Then the serious aging starts, and you know your fifties as gold poorly spent.

By Linda McCullough Moore
Poetry

Birdhouse

Do you have a twenty-foot extension ladder? / Good. / Let’s get it out of the garage. / I want to put this birdhouse up on one of the evergreens / that stands off your back deck.

By Tony Hoagland