Browse Topics
Sports
My Stupid Harmony
The Wish Family was my family dressed in red-white-and-blue outfits, performing songs written by my father and played by my older brother Todd on our secondhand piano, my sister Mare on a convicted uncle’s guitar, and my little brother Jay on a snare drum so beaten its skin had been taped.
May 2001Meeting The Sky
Golf was my father’s true beloved — more so, sadly, than I, or my mother, or anyone else. He embodied the very essence of the game. He was long, quiet stretches filled with difficult, sticky areas that one could navigate only after years of practice.
March 2001Cementhead
I can see where my spit blood turned the ice pink. Finally, I catch him in our goal crease. We butt heads before I haul him down and fall on him with my stick over his throat. I lean on the stick and grind a little until I feel that collarbone give — ka-pop.
June 2000On The Flying Trapeze
Sam Keen Ponders How To Be Free
I think trapeze could provide an excellent liturgy for a new society. Our present public liturgies, like football and basketball, are a kind of ritualized violence. One side has to beat the other. In trapeze, men and women cooperate to create something of transcendent beauty. A great trapeze act is a kind of performance art. Like a Navajo sand painting, it shows you something of exquisite beauty that lasts only for an instant and then is gone.
October 1999Anniversary Of My Father’s Death
For you, Dad, I turn on the ballgame. // It doesn’t matter which game, exactly, / does it? // So familiar, the way you spent the long hours / of your freedom, soaking up the drama, huge / warrior men in combat, lifting themselves / out of the mud
August 1998The Girl Everything Was Done To
She’d been abducted by a man she described as “dark, maybe a foreigner,” and held at an abandoned farmhouse in a remote section of woods, fairly close to where I lived. She had been raped by this dark stranger.
May 1998Omega Baseball
I had come to the Omega Institute, an adult summer learning center in the Hudson River Valley, on a lark, intrigued by a catalog description for a workshop that promised to integrate baseball with yoga, meditation, and martial arts.
October 1996Mickey Mantle, Mother, And The Secret Service
It’s August 1995, and Billy says the Mick is as good as dead. My brother counts one, two, three on his fingers: “First they give him a new liver. Then the cancer they missed eats up his lung. Then he dies.”
October 1996
