“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 For at least an hour or two every afternoon I plug away on a new slice of garden and a stone wall for Patti. The space takes full sun until evening next to a field where milkweed by the score hosts thousands of butterflies. All day Field Sparrows and Goldfinches come to the water and seed under the maple tree close-by. Wolfie follows me back and forth from the rock pile to the garden, […]
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You Can Listen Here Two Pit mixes, Tatum and Simon, are flying side by side across the grass of the paddock, low to the ground and yipping wildly. Simon can leap to face level with me from a standing position and has a head like the end of a shovel, but he is in love now, and all he wants is to chase Tatum who plays hard to get until he comes to me, a grinning […]
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You Can Listen Here This past week the heat has rested upon the Park like something swampy fat, indolent and gorged. The parking lots stay empty. No one goes there in the late afternoon, but that’s when we pull in to walk in the stream. Wolfie runs ahead of me to the first path; when I turn down through the trees, he is already standing belly deep and looking up for my arrival. The […]
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You Can Listen Here More than twenty years ago we sat across from each other in students’ chairs. She had come directly from work to Parent Conferences, driving through darkness and a storm that rain-lashed the windows of my classroom. Her son was now a junior; I had also taught him in ninth grade. He was a young black man, 17 and a remarkable athlete, very smart, a good writer, handsome, cocky, but with […]
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