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Childhood
A Device To Save My Life
From the inside cover of this particular book, an ad jumped out at me. I immediately knew that it would deliver me from my own enemies, most prominent among them Herr Schneider, my swimming instructor, who gave meaning to his life by ridiculing me in front of my classmates.
April 1992Close Calls
Getting mugged in Central Park, doing angel dust, driving into a telephone pole
April 1992This Body
My daughters want to know why I’ve started working out at the Y. I want bigger muscles, I tell them. I want to be stronger. They think this is hilarious: a forty-six-year-old man acting like he’s sixteen.
December 1991A Child’s Christmas On State Street
Somehow the knowledge of his identity passed through to me in the moment I stood there locked to him. It passed through his knuckles and into my skin. It burned out at me through his eyes.
December 1991Profit And Loss: Selling The Family Home
When you have grown from infancy to adulthood in one home. . . . The shape of the rooms becomes indistinguishable from the shape of one’s consciousness. I’m thirty-four years old, and that house and land are still the setting for half my dreams each night.
November 1991A Body Of Sound And Light
What is in a body? We see flesh with blood going through, but who knows what it is? I never asked before. All my life I saw a body as just a body, this bit of flesh we’re put inside the day we come alive.
November 1991Spilled Milk
My grandmother has told me the story so often, I vividly recall the milk house although I have never been there. It is built of gray stone gathered from the fields and held together with chalky mortar. A patch of moss by the door looks like a velvet pincushion. Inside: a cream separator, the churn, gleaming tin pails, and butter paddles, their wood frayed from years of use. I see them through her eyes as she recites them like the rosary, like a charm.
October 1991Enemies
Shifting into gear and ramming a garbage can into the wall, buying a house together, playing apple-war games
October 1991
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