“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 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 […]
read more
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 […]
read more
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 […]
read more
You Can Listen Here Alma Vogels, my mother in law, was raised by a mother and father who each lost one parent when they were young. They had been hurled into independence as children, and so, as if by osmosis, from an early age, Alma too settled into independence, a keeper of her own mind. Her father, Newlin Hoagland Harter*, was given over to a 12 year girl from the neighborhood, ‘Aunt Denie’, when […]
read more
