The smell of the hospital worked at John Latham as he rode the elevator up. Childhood fears had been implanted; the hospital air was still always hard for him to breathe. It was not easier this afternoon. The drive had been long and hot enough to steepen his hatred. He really had known better than…
Jane and I left Jack Essler’s land office determined, relieved, and grateful for our new sense of direction. We skipped across the street in the rain to the post office, where we found two letters and a small check from Miss Ellen waiting for us. From the postmaster we learned of a boat the blacksmith…
In 1939, both his parents dead and buried, in the Army Air Corps in basic training, Camel lay on his back and stared up at a wool blanket which hung down from the bunk above his and shaded him from the bright barracks light. As a boy he had lain under the low limbs of…
The first time I listened to a radio my friend Pelly drowned. My family – mother, cousin Jenny, father and I – lived, quite isolated, near Paduola Lake in northern Manitoba. Jenny, a pretty five years old when orphaned over to us, had hair black as birch knotholes, and the staccato yet elegant movements of…
From Anecdotes from an alley "There's a fire at Voorthuyzen's bakery on Main Street," his father had said during breakfast. "A large blazing fire," he had added. Half an hour later he shuffled back, his head lowered. His father had laughed at him. His mother had found it childish that he responded so angrily to…
I have no photographs of my father. One hot Saturday in June, my camera slung over my shoulder, I take the subway from Greenwich Village to Chinatown. I switch to the M local which becomes an elevated train after it crosses the Williamsburg Bridge. I am going to Ridgewood, Queens, where I spent my childhood….
Mother said, "You know? – your father was an only child." The insight was not so much given as discarded. She brushed the sleeve of her housecoat across her brow. "You see," she gasped – and I saw quite vividly, although I was eight years old and still partially invisible; my invisibility enhanced Mother's soliloquies….
His son wore a moustache. Over and between tan faces and the backs of heads with hair cut high and short, and green-uniformed shoulders and chest and backs, Harry saw him standing with two other second lieutenants at the bar. His black moustache was thick. Only one woman was at happy hour, a blonde captain:…
(a novel-in-progress) After you struggle up Santa Monica thru all that thick stop and go traffic and racket, you make those turns and suddenly it's quiet. When you start seein more trees and tall hedges and high walls than you do people, then you know youre in Beverly Hills. At the gate I had to…
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