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Family and Relationships
![[Her face was beaten and bloody]](https://planksun.blob.core.windows.net/sun-site-files/3089/7-26-rich.jpg)
The Good Times
Here I am, at the end of another long-term relationship. This time seems easier than the last, but I can’t really tell — time blurs my memory out of focus.
June 1974Flying And Diving, Shucking and Jiving — There Is No Other Life But This, But What Is This?
Susan says she is not a religious person, but she has a high regard for religion, and she doesn’t like to see it downgraded or made fun of. And Saul Alinsky, a Chicago “social activist” said that “Seeing is Believing” should be taken a lot more literally.
June 1974Sy’s New York Diary: Amazing Flesh
I read, in the newspaper, about a man who is dragged from his car, knifed repeatedly for the few dollars in his wallet, and left bleeding in the gutter. My mother says her friends don’t go out at night. It’s an old story, old as the city’s tired and dour expression, old as the dry and wrinkled hands of a man trying to remember better days and remembering nothing but bone.
June 1974The Traveler Returns: Home, More Or Less, At Last
Going home, as if home were still a possibility, or, like those other shadowy and relative values of our age — love, honesty, rationality — nothing more than a momentary echo of something past, and nearly forgotten, a smudge on the map, a torn page from the history book, when families stayed put, when the heart was forever, when politicians were statesmen, when faith was an arbiter at the edge of learning rather than a substitute for reason.
May 1974
Learning To Love
Living with and loving kids who never got an even break. I put aside the idea of climbing the mountain together. I read case histories and wonder if I could make even a small impression. Could they learn to love me as I love them? Could they begin to love our brothers and sisters as well? Is it even possible that they could learn to love parents; foster-parents; judges; probation officers; and policemen, who, in their own weakness, do the children so much wrong?
May 1974
