“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
You Can Listen Here Gather together one hundred teachers who have worked in the same two buildings. Add food and drink. Make it a celebratory evening — two of their own are retiring. Make it personal. It is personal. These people are one tribe. Not they. We. I am one of them. We share stories and worries, we run along the same lifeline of rumors, and we know the names of the families and […]
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You Can Listen Here Sitting with these good women banishes worries. I do not have to watch my words for there is no threat in the room, no duplicity, no predatory drive. We have been released to look and listen. Enough of our histories are known to the other to create clear portraits — both know of my comic desperations, my foolishness and dumbass remarks, the tragedies and the furies. There is coffee, the familiar pitch […]
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You Can Listen Here The cardinals and robins that came to my mother’s garden passed through my boyish attention. Life moved too fast. Birds were merely colors that appeared outside the kitchen window in speeded up time. My imaginative destination was far away. When I looked up at the sky, only the stars seized me. If something moved in their midst, I wanted it to be a machine which might descend to me alone, […]
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You Can Listen Here Simon, without a step, could spring level with my chest. In the field he ran after a ball with joyous concentration. Giving that up, he rumbled back to me looking like the Brit tanks at Cambrai , a low-to-the-ground, rough-clambering, muddy beastie. When I swiveled to greet him, he fell into my lap, his big head opening into the ingenuous Pit smile, that free, guileless grin. Cashmere was probably a bait dog , her face pin-pointed by […]
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