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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
TV Guide
I took a job in an area lacking electricity. Our daughters were two and four when we moved, and had had almost no contact with television. We lived for the next nine years without television.
November 1991Trail’s End
I know I’m in trouble when N. starts saving for a tent and sleeping bags. Then she brings home a book with the ominous title, North Carolina Hiking Trails. Actually, I’m fond of hiking, especially if I can relax at the end of the day with a bed and a bath. But to my wife, this is like washing down a gourmet dinner with a Dr. Pepper. She wants an experience of nature unmediated by civilized comfort. She wants to show me and J., her thirteen-year-old son, how to rough it.
October 1991Notes Of An Unknown Writer
I am now at an age where I have watched people grow old. They look older, maybe more feeble, their bodies thickening, their bones feeling more frail or their bodies a little stooped, their faces worried in a way I have always associated with older people. I see my friends looking more and more like my aunts and uncles did when I was a child. This is the first generation I have seen grow old. And it is a shock.
October 1991Spilled Milk
My grandmother has told me the story so often, I vividly recall the milk house although I have never been there. It is built of gray stone gathered from the fields and held together with chalky mortar. A patch of moss by the door looks like a velvet pincushion. Inside: a cream separator, the churn, gleaming tin pails, and butter paddles, their wood frayed from years of use. I see them through her eyes as she recites them like the rosary, like a charm.
October 1991Dark Honor: Vietnam Remembered
Both men were probably in their forties, tending their fields like the men of their village had for a thousand years, defending their families and their livelihood and their land like men everywhere. In a few hours or in a few days they would be dead — after the ARVN beat confessions out of them, or applied electrodes to their balls and sent jolts of concentrated anguish through their bodies until they wished to escape by dying, by being shot in the head or dragged behind an Amphtrack or thrown from a helicopter, anything to make the pain stop.
October 1991Everybody’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?
September 1991Night 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.
September 1991The 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.
September 1991Secret Power
A generation of men, wrote Homer, is like a generation of leaves.
August 1991Euclid’s Hell
It’s amazing to me how little respect most people seem to have for reality. The mind is capable of tricking us into accepting its version of what takes place around us. We repeatedly mistake our perceptions for the stuff of existence, even when we know better.
August 1991
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