Browse Sections
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
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.
August 1996The 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.
August 1996Fist 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.
August 1996Glorious Failure
Bad news is supposed to travel fast, but this news took nearly three months to get from a snowcapped mountain in Vermont to my office in North Carolina. It finally arrived on a beautiful spring afternoon, eyes downcast, dragging its heels.
July 1996Dad Left, So We Got A Television Set
When my father left, my mother bought our first television set. She put it in what was now her bedroom. Three pieces of furniture floated in that spacious room: a Singer sewing machine, a mattress atop a box spring, and now a black-and-white television with rabbit ears.
July 1996The Wilderness Within
During aimless wanderings in the woods, while on the verge of becoming lost, I have often wondered what we mean by the word wilderness.
July 1996The Technology Of Simplicity
When I was eleven or twelve, I used to go deer hunting with my father. He would wake me before dawn on cold, crisp October days, and we would dress silently in the dim glow of a night light, not wanting to awaken the rest of the house.
July 1996At The Altar Of Progress
It is characteristic of industrialism to make swift and thorough use of nature’s stored-up treasures and living organisms (called “resources”) without regard to the stability or sustainability of the world that provides them.
July 1996On Being Beautiful
I’m beautiful. It’s lasted quite a long time, this beauty of mine, but it won’t be lasting much longer because I’m forty now, as I’m writing this, forty now and probably by the time you read it forty-one, and so on and so forth, and we all know it ends up as worms or ashes, but for the time being I’m still beautiful.
June 1996The Cantor’s Birthday
Before they kissed, they cried. With her head against his shoulder, they ended the war. With his lips brushing her eyelids, they ended the war. With her fingers mapping the lines of his face, they ended the war. With his knees tucked into the hollow of her knees, they ended the war.
June 1996
Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today