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A Slightly Burning Bush

A personal visit from God could turn my life around. Then it wouldn’t matter that I was terrible at dodge ball, that I wore homemade dresses, that I didn’t have a Captain Midnight lunch box, that I had the lowest cookie-sales record in the Brownies. They’d point at me on the playground. That’s Ashley. God came to see her. Yeah. She told us all about it at show and tell.​

Confessions Of A Catholic Girl

We were seven years old. The Church believed we had reached the age of reason. I believed that when the priest placed the first holy wafer on my tongue, if I didn’t swallow it, if I could keep it from melting in my mouth, then when I stepped outside the church I would rise into the sky.

Chocolate

A Swiss boarding school, a twig from a licorice plant, a chocolatier

Sunbeams

How many times have you tried to shield yourself by reading the newspaper, watching television, or just spacing out? That is the $64,000 question: how much have you connected with yourself at all in your whole life?

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Tanganyika

The night of the day that Dr. Martin Luther King was shot, my parents had gone to the art museum in Cleveland to see a stunning painting by Titian of Mars and Venus, a fat naked Venus and a Mars clad in Renaissance armor. But instead of eating a fancy dinner or making love in a motel room, they were frantically trying to book a flight back to Newark, New Jersey, which was burning to the ground.

Song

Then my father saw me. Liam got up — to keep him from me, I think. What chance did he think he had against such hate? My father threw him down again.

The Apple

Late at night I heard a scream. Ivan was shaking me violently. “Father’s dying!” he shrieked. It was pitch-black in the room. I sprang out of bed, and both of us ran to our parents’ bedroom. “Where’s Mother?”

Shyness

Picture days in grade school, summers on fire lookouts, Saturday afternoons at the movies

An Unwed Mother Says Farewell To A Small Town in Alabama

Four Stories

One day the cocoon hatched. But there was no butterfly. Instead, hundreds and hundreds of baby praying mantes spread across my dresser top and marched down the side.