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Vespers

Awkwardly, in fits and starts, the words came back to me.

Hail Mary, full of grace,
the Lord is with thee . . .

An Encounter

This afternoon, waiting for the crosstown bus at 79th and Third Avenue, leaning wearily against the shelter support — a long wait — I saw Christ.

A Story

For years I would ask my wife each day at dinner, “Why must we eat this food? It’s terrible — knishes, chicken soup, challah, kreplach,” and my wife would say, “We have to eat this food. We’re Jewish.”

Sunbeams

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

Ernest Hemingway

Sunbeams

We manipulate nature as if we were stuffing an Alsatian goose. We create new forms of energy; we make new elements; we kill crops; we wash brains. I can hear them in the dark sharpening their lasers.

Erwin Chargaff

The Flood

There was no irrefutable justification for a sentence of genocide. But that was the verdict.

Sunbeams

If Rosa Parks had moved to the back of the bus, you and I might never have heard of Dr. Martin Luther King.

Ramsey Clark

Jesus

Right now it is eight-fifteen in the morning. I am on my way up to the office, alone in the elevator. It stops at the second floor. The door opens, and who should get on but Jesus.

Compromising Pictures

The Kindness Of Strangers

The original Odd Couple, Vivaldi on the bus, a sheep dog named Sailor