Sometimes we sense that even the dead are connected to the fabric of life. My wife tells me that a graduate student came to her office and told this story, which he claims is true. An old man died at 3:47 AM in Mercy Hospital of Pittsburgh. His brother, who had had Alzheimer’s disease for …
Departure Before my sister leaves I know that there is never a return that there is nothing but a wooden vision of steps leading out to road. We talk inside the steam of coffee cups inside the round chk chk chk of summer sprinkler her wedding already a permanence …
Something has Happened to Me and there are paths in fields to prove it. Bent blades of grass, monitored hills, cracked cords of wood from trees that ward me away with ivy. I envy the movement of their shadows. The outstanding height of their leaves, flatter than hands, they cannot even handle the weight …
as sung by Glen Campbell He tells me he wants to be a Rhinestone Cowboy. He smells like stale Lucky Strikes, the Aegean, and boatwright’s sweat, I found this stupid ex-pat bar in a guidebook. riding out on a horse in a star-spangled rodeo. Barely old enough to be his daughter, but …
We make lists to organize our lives. Lists of food. Of errands. Of goals. “To Do.” They’re concrete things that measure our productivity, our ambition, sometimes even our feelings. This week for class, we focused on list making. The men had some experience making lists during our first class when they made lists of things …
I think it was the short-story writer Alice Munro who said that she is always looking for a place to hide in the house, a place away from children, the phone ringing, chores to be done, the sociability of neighbors, a place to sit and stare at a blank wall, a place to get on …
A colorful baby boy’s room. A quiet fishing lake. A tight-knit urban neighborhood. A woman’s steady arms. A lively street in NYC. These are the places where the inmates of ACJ want to be. Places they want to remember, places they choose to re-create. As each man reads his piece to the class, I start …
Mr. Eagleton is scheduling his classes according to the National Weather Service. He’s not from here. So he comes into my room, and asks me about “the rainy season”. He doesn’t have any shades on his windows, so his plans to show movies on days when it’s overcast. Depending on where you are in the …