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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Predator’s Garden
Until I started a garden, I never considered deer predators simply because I did not consider plants prey. As a transplanted city dweller, I imagined that sighting a deer from my living-room window was the blessing of a rural lifestyle.
February 1995Dale
Dale and I sit in opposite corners of the nearly empty McDonald’s where I come to grade freshman English themes — he by the front window and I in the back near the restrooms. Twenty years ago we worked together, but now Dale is homeless, and I pretend not to know him.
February 1995Their Turn
To the melancholy wailing of a Turkish flute, the dervishes enter the stage dressed in long black coats and tall woolen hats. It’s a dramatic moment even if you haven’t done your homework.
January 1995Breakfast At The Victory
In the Victory there was no such thing as The Last Word. Truths, conclusions, absolutes — all had about the same permanence as the steamy smells that circulated in the Victory and drifted out onto the street.
January 1995Cosmic Airdrome (revisited)
One way to know something is true is that you cannot back off from knowing it. You cannot go slumming in ignorance. You cannot pretend not to know what you have experienced. It is a sin to doubt it.
January 1995Rats
In the seventies, over a period of five years, I killed approximately two thousand rats. That’s four hundred rats per year, a little over a rat a day.
January 1995The Little Bit
When you’re a child, you have the little bit and it has you. You throw it up and clap your hands. Your father momentarily catches it, but it is yours in your little animal eyes, your tender knees, the way a banana unwraps in your small hands, unzips as you slowly pull down the peel and reveal the soft, pale fruit.
December 1994Stories Of Lives Lived And Now Ending
At the heart of it, all we can really offer each other is our full attention. When people are dying, their tolerance for bullshit is minimal. They will quickly sniff out insincerity.
December 1994Waiting For Emma
In fact, we’ve always been positive about having another child. We both imagine a daughter: Emma, a real fireball, definite in her opinions and politically precocious. I can even see the birth announcement. It says, “Announcing . . .” in bold type on the cover, then opens up to a color xerox of Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People — that painting of a woman who’s marching over the barricades, one breast bared, with a fearless young kid waving his pistols and a dying old man looking up at her in wonder. I know that sounds odd for a card introducing a newborn, but that’s what I see: woman warrior.
November 1994Us And Them
Time was when I knew the racists were the lunch-counter owners who refused to serve blacks, the warmongers were the generals who planned wars and ordered the killing of innocent people, and the polluters were the industrialists whose factories fouled the air, water, and land. I was a good guy, boycotting, marching, and sitting-in to protest the actions of the bad guys.
November 1994
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