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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Yahrzeit
And every year thereafter on the anniversary of Michael’s death, Hal places a call to me to talk about Michael. A commemoration, this. In Judaism, the anniversary of a loved one’s death — called yahrzeit — is carefully noted with rituals: visits to the cemetery, a consciousness through prayer, and, most notably, a candle lit which burns for the twenty-four-hour day, its light and shadow a reminder of loss and life’s continuity.
July 2002
The Greatest Obstacle To Enlightenment
The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form.
July 2002
Where The Rain Belongs
After three nights at the Broadway Motel out on the highway ($12.95 a night, color TV), seven nights in a forty-dollar-a-week First Street flophouse with free running roaches and dying winos, and two rumpled and freezing nights listening to the rain clatter against the roof of my car, I took to the streets of Eureka, California, on foot in search of an apartment and a job.
June 2002
The Exegesis Of Eating
And thou shalt treat the food that touches thy lips with reverence, in recognition of the labors and traditions of thine ancestors, and in communion and fellowship with those to whom thou art tied with bonds of blood and love.
June 2002
A Day In The Life Of A Nonrecovering Alcoholic
If you want to spot an alcoholic, look for someone who is always chewing breath mints. This is worth ten points. Strong perfume counts for another ten. You get twenty for slightly over-the-top jocularity; twenty-five for an inadvertent slur.
June 2002
Drowning Revisited
It is always someone’s fault. A drowning is rarely blameless. At the very least, there’s a lingering feeling that it could have been prevented. Your friend recommends a good vacation spot in the Bahamas to her neighbors; they go, and the husband drowns.
May 2002
Art Earthquake
“My front tires are so worn I can see the steel belts,” Michelle told me on the phone. “They could blow out any minute. Will you come with me to Kingston to fix them?”
May 2002
Talk
The sound of air expanding in my chest cavity and then being forced past the catgut of my vocal cords — that’s the sound my mother heard. It was a frightening, ugly sound, but the grief was pure and clean. Against the thickness of it, the viscosity, my mother would segue from soothing words into stories.
May 2002
We Decided To Call It Baseball
The day after my mother told him the news, he called. His voice cracked, and I could hear him trying to pick up his words and hand them to me, one by one. “Are you all right?” he asked, over and over. It wasn’t so much what he said as what I heard in his voice: I heard somebody I’d never met before, a man he didn’t even know so well himself.
April 2002Quills
My companion, Amelia, had a clear view of the whole incident. It went like this: It was 6 P.M. on a Friday, and we both wanted to finish stripping the doors of this old farmhouse before dinner. With a lot of little bedrooms, we had a lot of doors to strip.
April 2002
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