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The Anxious Wrestler

A Zen Story Of Psychotherapy

Nothing remained in the temple — except the mighty ocean rising and falling, and surging onward in its cycles. This was the sole reality. The temple itself disappeared. There was only the ocean, and the wrestler himself was the ocean.

Gold And Black

Then he turns to me, and direct as an arrow says, “You gonna be there?” (This, I thought, is what they refer to in books as “the moment of truth.”) My heart was creeping up my esophagus like an inchworm; but my tongue would not unwind.

Old Friends

Two World Wars and the Great Depression, the old Firesign Theater “Everything You Know Is Wrong,” a wet comb

Spectators

The Match

There was a woman with one desire: to win a tennis game with God. She invited God to play tennis. God agreed and they set a date: Saturday, March 3.

Spring Training

The package is wrapped in brown paper and it is soft, like somebody’s laundry coming back. It was delivered to the Admin building by the UPS, with Turley’s name on the address label. Sometimes Turley used to get a new pair of handle grips through the UPS, with his name on the label, but this is the first package he has gotten since the middle of the winter, when Mr. Parker died.

Photographs By John Rosenthal

The photographs from this selection are available as a PDF only. Click here to download.

Growing Older

The Original Odd Couple, a soccer coach, a bibliophile

Outfielder

Coggins walked through an afternoon fog as soft and gray-white as his own hair. He had walked a half mile or so nearly every day for twenty years — at first on the advice of a doctor who had repaired his heart, and then later because it became his deepest habit, and broke the day.

Carolina Basketball

For the past few weeks in Chapel Hill we have gathered in front of our television sets to watch the Carolina basketball team move steadily through the NCAA tournament, game by game, winning them all, never with any great ease but always looking like the team everyone of us wanted: disciplined but unpredictable, talented beyond legitimate expectation but not overly-talented like a “bought” team, as good at defense as offense, and most important of all (at least for the fan), a team which in its combined personality embodied all the complex and contradictory elements of our own personalities.