He: is being as clear and logical as one beer will grant him. “We can fix up the bathroom for $8,000 and that will add at least $12,000 to the value of our trailer. We can stay in Doug’s joint in Puerto Vallarta while the work is being done, that’s cheaper than staying here, we’ll [...]

Lunch money in those days was forty cents; a quarter, dime and a nickel. We bought them by the roll. Issuing lunch money was the transition for all of us between family and school. You’ve got your lunch money, now you belong to that other institution. Good bye, see you after school.
The second would sometimes [...]

Chicago in mid-November is cold, bitter cold. We’ve just finished a heavy lunch at a German restaurant, heavy because, well, it’s our last one together. And the German restaurant because that was where we had retreated after the attack and tear-gassing on that August 28, 1968 afternoon.  We were SDS then, Students for a Democratic [...]

Every memorial, those celebrations of life, is a lie. Encapsulation of a life into an afternoon or evening event necessarily fails and shits upon its own chest. Of course we need to grieve together, as we need to do so many things together. Hold me; hold me tight, and I will be all right. A [...]

Rosa’s older sister is engaged to be married, and watching the two lovers together has charged her own sweet romantic fantasies.  These fantasies have largely eased her fears that her mother’s anger and increasing disapproval pinpoint her failures. It’s true that school did not go well this year. She cannot imagine her future happiness diminished [...]

Evolutionary success has come because we are social animals, able to cooperate. It takes many to kill a mastodon and many to create a United Nations. We need to belong; we need to be liked, we need to relate to others so that what we see is confirmed by what they see: our constructed reality [...]

Their mood is as gray as the day and as the water flowing by; not light, not dark, just gray. They have met weekly like this for years, always in gray places; the train station when the next train doesn’t arrive for another hour. They had gone to Herbert Hoover High School together, class of [...]

I stop by George’s place to help with sending “Phlog” books out to be considered for an independent publishing award. It is a few days before Christmas. He is not home but is due soon; he’s picking up his granddaughter Lane, his son Mark’s daughter, from the airport, arriving from her home in Ann Arbor, [...]

She had mailed off the manuscript two months ago, to Harcourt Brace, the London office. It was in the style of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, yet even longer. It is the story of her life’s journey, blown off course by the death of her parents in an unusual auto accident leaving her to [...]