Salt and Pepper White privilege it’s called and recently I learned its name although I’ve been white as a sheet for decades. Like breathing and eating I take white privilege for granted. I push a cart through a megastore in bib overalls and no one follows me and when I hail a cab in a snow storm, it picks me up. My freckles may be a stop sign. Not so […]
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Fifty years ago Jane got on a plane and flew away without saying good-bye. Her parents took her, I know. She was only 14 but she could have said good-bye to me, the swain who saw her through our last three years of grammar school when she wore braces, the only girl who had them. Fifty years later at our […]
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Every once in awhile over the last 40 years Ralph wondered what might have happened to the guy who had moved in with the mother of his children and drank all the time. He remembered the kids saying when they were small the fellow got up one night to go to the bathroom and got lost in the hallway went back to […]
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An Act of the Will If love’s real, not the puppy kind, it’s not just a feeling but an act of the will a constant giving whether one feels like it or not. After many years you don’t know why you’re doing it or why It must be done. Two begin as grapes purple with passion unaware you’ll be raisins wrinkling at the end.
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A Puzzling Marriage Married 60 years Fred and Daisy still are very different people. All day long they hide their differences to make their marriage last but every night after supper they let them out silently. Fred in his recliner works a crossword puzzle while Daisy in the dining room works a jigsaw puzzle but neither Fred nor Daisy speaks a word until one has finished and howls […]
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At Midnight in New York It’s midnight in New York and in this tall building Herb and Molly are in bed making love. Molly is a virgin and it hurts. Olga’s upstairs in bed with cancer terminal and it hurts. Melvin’s downstairs in bed snoring. Nothing hurts because he doesn’t know yet he has multiple sclerosis. In the hallway a thief goes floor […]
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We’re going dancing, my wife and I, to a Charity Ball high in the sky where Glenn Miller’s band has been playing since 1944, the year his plane got lost over the English Channel. No wreckage was ever found, not a single body. Glenn Miller was going to France to play for American troops during World War II. Government records say he’s still “missing in action.” Maybe so, […]
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A Facility for the Poor and Demented Fred visits Bill every month at the facility he’s been in for years. Age and booze brought Bill there. He’s still strapped to his bed so he can’t go wandering again when he gets a taste for a beer. Bill calls Fred by name this time and asks if Jim has found a job. […]
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It was an ancient city. All the young people left as soon as they could but the old remained in their mortgaged huts surrounded by evergreens that offered a haven for cardinals and jays, robins and finches. No matter the season birds flew from tree limbs to feed on seed and suet put out by too many widows […]
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Donald Trump and Mother Teresa Time’s a jet plane when you’re young. You go to school get a good job marry someone nice and have a family if that’s your calling. Then the kids grow up and move out and things start falling apart even if you have a pension and many now won’t. Poor health sneaks in like a submarine and in […]
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