Manners
Licking your plate, listening to screams echoing up the stairwell, entertaining yourself
August 1996
Oh perfect word, shaped to meaning like a body without an ounce of fat: supple, strong, walking through the centuries like a god.
Sunbeams
Whenever people say, “We mustn’t be sentimental,” you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add, “We must be realistic,” they mean they are going to make money from it.
Breathing Lessons
An Interview With Larry Rosenberg
In the end, no path is going to fit you 100 percent. Making your way through different ones, using your innate wisdom and your awareness, is part of the practice. The standard that helped me decide was the original standard of the Buddha: “I teach only suffering and the end of suffering.” So ask yourself, “Is this way of life, this method, this teacher helping me to shed my suffering? Is my life becoming lighter? Am I becoming less self-centered?”
The Other Woman
Gina and I just happened to fall for the same guy — a man who married the wrong woman, was miserable for twenty years until the divorce, and now wants to answer only to himself.
The Kingdom, The Kingdom
Deep in the heart of this desert land, rising up out of nowhere amid the sea of sand, is the city: Riyadh! We can drive out of town a bit and see camels wandering about; their owners let them loose to wander for eleven months at a time!
At Home In L.A.
The first time I met my future in-laws, I was standing next to the bed that their son and I had been sharing for some months. The apartment was small, the bed very large. While the four of us made a stab at pleasantries, our eyes darted furtively to pillows and sheets.
Fist Stick Knife Gun
If you wonder how a fourteen-year-old can shoot another child in the head, or how boys can commit a drive-by shooting and then go home to dinner, you need to realize that one doesn’t get to that point in a day, or a week, or a month.
The Game Of High School
Bob Penny, voted Most Self-Absorbed Hunk by a committee of me, said, I am in my big-boob period, as he pretended to swoon over Lisa Belia. I took his remark to be of the making-me-jealous variety. I didn’t even have to pretend to ignore it, because I was in love with you.
A Coward And A Thief
On the counter top there’s a pad of paper with some familiar but illegible scrawl. The handwriting is angry. Next to the pad is a five-dollar bill under a refrigerator magnet. Too obvious. More clunking sounds from the basement. I wonder if he’s down there.
