Reflections Of A Ninety-Three-Year-Old Revolutionary

An Interview With Hazel Wolf

If I’d known as a child what I know now, I’d have become an environmentalist on the spot. I guess you could say that my childhood dreams led me first to help people in their individual environments — housing and health care, and things like that. But I ended up working to save our natural home.

The Attending Physician

These days, the label “attending” is attached to “physician” as a matter of course, obscuring the possibility that it might once have meant something beyond a job description.

Everybody’s Lie

The only thing more complete than this moment will be the loss of it, as memory repudiates everything. But why complain, when even the complaint will be forgotten?

Night Of Dying

I had known all week that Keith would die that weekend. I knew he wanted me there when he died, not at work, or waiting at a red light, or picking up bread or milk, or waiting in line at the bank. He waited for me.

Out Of Season

Last week while she was in bed with the first bout of morning sickness, she watched the “Donahue” show. The woman he was interviewing, a fleshy redhead who leaned sensuously toward the camera, had just written The Mistress Book.

Lady Con

Even with two thick coverlets over the blankets, her pelvic bone pressed like a wooden hanger against my cheek; I was sure it would leave a red mark. She had been eating for nearly two weeks now. How thin could she have been when she was first released?

Letter From A Mailbag

It was a dare. A dare I gave myself, but still a dare: “I will ride in a mailman’s pouch all day, and write an article about it for The New Yorker.”

Trains

The Wash Prayer

After Reading Rilke’s “Archaic Torso Of Apollo”