Issue 120 | The Sun Magazine

November 1985

Readers Write

What I’d Most Like To Change

The constant nagging desire to change things; my fear of death; my inner victim into a happier, healthier being

By Our Readers
Quotations

Sunbeams

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it — and stop there — lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again — and that is well; but she will also never sit down on a cold one anymore.

Mark Twain

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Why I Like Dead People

I like dead bodies: at no other time am I so aware of my own animation. This isn’t because I am lucky and this poor fool is not, but because here before me is the mute, incontrovertible evidence. Some force drives these shells, and it drives me still. I am a witness, an attestant, to a foresworn truth.

By Sallie Tisdale
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Red Dawn Over Tweetsie

When I saw “Red Dawn,” I realized that a private and relatively innocent part of my adolescence had become tribalized on a mass scale, and from that fact flowed a palpable undercurrent of menace that had never been there for us.

By William Trotter
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Letters From The Road

Greetings from the Laundry Basket, or more accurately THE LAUNDRY B SKET, a laundromat in Austin. The tall and weathered man next to me has been listening to Talk Radio: an anti-pornography Texan made the shrewd point that cigarettes can’t be advertised on TV. Then time ran out.

By Sparrow
Fiction

The Secret Of Life

I recall another day back in junior high. He wrote upon the blackboard large: DNA/RNA. He pointed to the letters lying there like some Kabbalistic mantra, then said, “This is the secret of life.”

By Patricia Bralley