“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 of us sat in the doctor’s waiting room bathed in the unbearable noise of Good Morning America. The other person was a patient; she soon escaped. My wife was with the doctor; I was doomed. The volume, like some pernicious living thing, was so loud that it crowded out the ability to focus away from the big screen. It hung above the patient’s entrance next to the admission’s cubicle. […]
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You Can Listen Here Beyond flesh and bone, I think that we are made of memory, and memory is the vault that contains the stories that shape our identities. So what can be told about my mother, the daughter of a locomotive engineer and […]
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You Can Listen Here Ice ambles directly towards me and blocks my path. Absurdly, I repeat a refrain to him, “Ice Ice baby” that has me sounding like a refugee from bad music land. He crosses me with his body, sits and leans. His head rises above my waist. He weighs 160 pounds, and he will have some of the treats he knows that I carry in my pocket. When I offer one flat […]
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You Can Listen Here All my adult life I’ve been trying to learn how to see. One experience came as close to a type of consecration as I’m likely to ever feel — when I was 23, I took a summer graduate course at Montana State University, Literature and the Wilderness, that asked of its students that they read 8 books and write voluminously about what they had learned. We also were taught technical […]
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