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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Parting Questions
When I told my sister, my mother, and my friends that the voice was real, they said I was wrong; it wasn’t possible. Their disbelief was hard for me to take. It scared me. I stopped talking to them.
October 2003
The Pleasure Was All Mine
“Leroy’s going to stay here for a little while,” Jerry announced to my husband Ralph and me one day. Leroy stood behind him looking skinny and frail, dressed in a frayed nylon sweat suit and carrying a paper sack of belongings.
October 2003End Times
I am headed toward Florida as my country heads toward war with Iraq. Protests rage around the world, but I do not join the protesters with their “No blood for oil” signs. Every year I’ve been alive, there has been war somewhere. At the beginning of 2003 there were thirty wars being fought around the world.
October 2003
Fighting In The Zendo
When the doctors told us Jeff was dying of leukemia, he and I began to fight. Jeff was twenty-nine, I was twenty-eight, and we’d been building a sixteen-by-twenty-four-foot timber-frame cabin on a small hill of hard ground in Vermont’s Green Mountains.
September 2003
Hello, I Must Be Going
The story of my life is the story of the Tao Te Ching. I first discovered this book, by Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, when I was twelve years old. At that time I was in the smartest class at P.S. 152 in Manhattan. In fact, I was one of the smartest youths in the smartest class. I commonly received grades of 98, 99, and 100. I was also president of the class, and captain of the monitor squad. I planned to become a doctor.
September 2003When The Hills Flow With Wine
Vera piled the thin, silvery black fish on my plate. Their beady little fish eyes kept staring at me. As a distraction, and for revenge, and because I was hungry, I focused on the technique of eating them: first pinch the head between my finger and thumb; then take two precise bites — one on each side — and a few nibbles to steal all the meat from each.
September 2003
True Forgiveness
Forgiveness takes forms as diverse and unpredictable as human beings themselves. For some it comes naturally and spontaneously, while others may find that it has to be cultivated with effort in the hard soil of their nature.
September 2003
A Partial Inventory Of The Great Mistakes I Have Made
Burning the teakettle to a crisp because the whistle was broken and I forgot I’d turned it on.
August 2003
Rules Of The Dream
Last night I dreamed I was a Chinese man who worked in a nuclear power plant. The plant leaked radiation, and I spoke out about it and was denounced by the authorities. At home, my mother looked at me coldly and said that I was no longer her son.
August 2003
The Boy Who Kissed The Soldier
In the ruins of Jenin, an old friend of mine is digging bodies out of the rubble where Israeli bulldozers have flattened houses, burying people alive. She describes the scene to me: Blackened, maggot-ridden corpses are displayed to anguished relatives for identification.
August 2003
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