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Death
Katydid
I saw my grandmother revived a few more times than was kind, and I can’t forget how she said to us, straight and clear out of the depths of her dementia: “Don’t ever let yourself get to this point.”
July 2012
If I Should Ever Lose My Mind
My grandmother always said that if she ever lost her mind, I should put a pillow over her head — meaning she wanted me to press a pillow against her face until she suffocated, thus sparing her whatever indignities she imagined people who lost their minds were forced to endure.
July 2012
The Book Of Job: A Quiz
Recently I came up with the idea of writing a series of personal essays on biblical events. First, of course, I had to read the Bible. But the Bible and I did not hit it off. Children’s Bibles proved to be more my speed, particularly one by Seymour Rossel.
May 2012March 2012
I woke up this morning on the third planet from the sun. In the twenty-first century. In the United States of America. Outside, the sky was still dark, but at the flip of a switch the room was flooded with light. Amazing!
March 2012Meat
My friend Tommy Crotty, who was a terrific basketball player in New York and went on to play college ball and be a cheerful husband and excellent dad before the idiot who just died in Abbottabad murdered him and thousands of people on September Eleventh, used to call every big guy he ever played with Meat.
March 2012
Underneath The Armor
Four months into their seven-month tour, the mostly nineteen- and twenty-year-old marines at Patrol Base Fires in Sangin, Afghanistan, had seen enough violence to permanently line their boyish faces. Two of their platoon’s men had been killed by improvised explosive devices [IEDs], one of them blown literally in two.
March 2012Snowstorm
Heavy, wet snow all morning, then by noon / the clouds wrung dry, whipped away, / the sky so brilliant after the viewing / and graveside service for our youngest
January 2012
Letter To Josh’s Mom
I have a folder of her letters. It’s behind the tax returns and the manuals to DVD players long since broken. Nearly every letter Josh’s mom has ever sent me is in that folder: seventeen in all, in chronological order.
December 2011
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