“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 Liam has settled into his normal rhythm of alert forward movement, his head up and watchful. Between his pauses to mark territory and his scent alerts, we go on like this for a quarter mile. I’m watching for cats. Liam will snap them up if given the chance. Nothing else triggers this prey drive in him – he sweeps past scurrying chickens as if they were stones. A neighbor’s dog […]
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You Can Listen Here In paragraphs built around a subtext of flight, Amelia Earhart tries to spin and roll away from her impending marriage. Her fiancee, George Putnam, had asked her to marry him six times; she finally said yes, but then in early 1931, shortly before the ceremony, she wrote a letter of six paragraphs. Read it aloud. It feels like listening to something big and desperate batter itself against thick walls. She writes this […]
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You Can Listen Here Before Lincoln there was St. Catherine, but before Catherine came Christopher. Catholics raised in the faith, even those who have turned away, rarely lose complete touch with pieces of its rituals and observances. My Uncle’s funeral took place at St. Catherine Laboure** in Harrisburg. A glass box encased in the wall contains a medal of the Immaculate Conception as commissioned by the Virgin Mary — St. Catherine said that she […]
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You Can Listen Here An age ago, in 1977, late and driving fast on a shortcut in a bad car in sleety rain to a graduate course, my used Ford Maverick, my first car, coughed, coughed again, and the dashboard lit up — somewhere in the engine steel was rubbing against steel. I pulled onto the shoulder, stopped, popped the hood and got out, and stared at smoke rising from the center of all that greased-up […]
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