Issue 142 | The Sun Magazine

September 1987

Readers Write

Secrets

A lemon meringue pie, a little model of a dinosaur, a 31-inch Hillerich & Bradsby baseball bat

By Our Readers
Quotations

Sunbeams

Life is short and it hurts. Love is the only drug that works.

John Coit

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Turquoise Dragon

Remembering Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1940-1987)

He was a short man with glasses and a penetrating smile, and a high, almost falsetto voice. He was enamored of Oxford English and taught elocution, after his own comical fashion. (Elocution lessons were given at one o’clock in the morning, before an audience of 400 laughing spectators.)

By Stephen T. Butterfield
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Guru

Excerpted From Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

People always come to the study of spirituality with some ideas already fixed in their minds of what it is they are going to get and how to deal with the person from whom they think they will get it. The very notion that we will get something from a guru — happiness, peace of mind, wisdom, whatever it is we seek — is one of the most difficult preconceptions of all.

By Chögyam Trungpa
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Harvest Moon

Portrait Of A Nursing Home

We all die, and most of us grow old, and for a certain inevitable number of us age brings its sisters: dependence, frailty, and a gut-wrenching perishability. Age is the last place and time most of us will inhabit, and the fact that age seems so foreign to most of us, as though cleft from the known world, is one of life’s sly tricks.

By Sallie Tisdale
Fiction

The Short And Happy Life Of Spaghetti Johnson

He knew understanding was coming to him, like the answer to a riddle which has broken its anchor line in the unconscious and is floating up toward consciousness, becoming more illuminated by the light of consciousness.

By Jon Remmerde
Fiction

What Will Be

I should have known Brian would leave me. I should have felt his restlessness and uncertainty. Instead, I woke up four Mondays ago with only a tattered note for a companion. I was abandoned, surprised, and angry. What good were my powers if I couldn’t predict my own life?

By Deborah Shouse