Browse Topics
Friendship
Uncommon Weather
Herb had finally hit the jackpot in the herring-roe fishery and decided that, with the girls gone, I might enjoy some creature comforts to take the edge off being alone in the cabin so much. Unfortunately I had already come to the same conclusion, and one of the comforts I’d treated myself to was named Jimmy.
October 2009
The Classified Ad
The Sumner Press, the weekly paper from my hometown in southeastern Illinois, continues to arrive in my mailbox in Ohio even though I’m not a subscriber. A few years ago, when my wife and I were the grand marshals for the Sumner fall-festival parade, the publisher gave us a complimentary one-year subscription. The subscription has run out, but the paper keeps coming, as if a higher power has decided I need it in my life.
September 2009
Theo’s Map
My friend’s uncle scared me. He lived in a dome house he’d built from compressed styrofoam blocks, giving it the appearance of an igloo. It had a composting toilet and a dirt floor, and it looked absolutely extraterrestrial on the little plot of ground across the pasture from our Kentucky farm, such that I thought it might simply lift off and head into the Milky Way, leaving the fields of corn behind.
August 2009
Fences
Access to water, a moose disappearing into the trees, the Israeli security fence
August 2009
Aftertaste
Although it’s close to Labor Day, there is no hint of fall in the air. No streaks of red in the trees, no breeze stirring the leaves. The temperature in these last days of August has been ferociously high, even for Manhattan. Every day dawns steamy, and by nighttime a haze of heat blocks out the moon.
August 2009
Suburban Bitch Cruise
Virginia and I were in an English-literature class together during my senior year at the State University of New York at Albany. She wore black-rimmed “cafe girl” glasses and had one of those bright, pale faces that slips back and forth from plain to attractive. Altogether her style was a mixture of grunge and hippie, and I found Virginia sexy as hell. During the week that we covered James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, she and I united against the close-minded faction in class who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, comprehend how one man could love another. We chastised them on breaks and shouted them down during discussions. At the end of class one evening, Virginia discovered that I, too, liked getting high, and she smiled — her face alive with mischief — and counted off three words on her fingers: Suburban. Bitch. Cruise.
July 2009The Way To Mercy
There are three things you need to be a smelt fisherman: a net, a bucket, and your thumb. There is only one thing you need to be a cadaver, and that’s to be dead. My father and I had gone smelt fishing each spring ever since I’d turned seven. Now it was 1972, I was a boy of ten, and Richard Nixon had just been reelected president.
July 2009
Boy Squared
My mind had a mind of its own, and over the top of the real world, my mind’s mind projected a world that to me was even more real. Creston Avenue — the street I lived on with my mother and my older sister, Asia — was two streets: one the way it actually was, and one the way it ought to be.
May 2009
Dad For A Day
A big part of being a man, it seems, is being a dad. As I’ve gotten older and watched many of my peers get married and start families, I’ve begun wondering whether I shouldn’t have a kid, too. But getting one, it turns out, is not so simple. With no partner at the moment, and with kidnapping still illegal in New York State, I’ve chosen to rent.
October 2008
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