Issue 339 | The Sun Magazine

March 2004

Readers Write

Deception

About sexual disease, about adoption, about fidelity

By Our Readers
Sy Safransky's Notebook

March 2004

I’m tired this morning after having stayed up too late last night. Apparently I still haven’t learned how to tell time. If the little hand is on the 11 or 12, and the big hand is reaching for the remote or something to eat, does this mean I have all the time in the world?

By Sy Safransky
Quotations

Sunbeams

[The philosopher] Wittgenstein writes about a man who, not being certain of an item he reads in the newspaper, buys one hundred copies of the paper to reassure himself of its truth.

Richard Kehl

The Sun Interview

Weapons In The War For Human Kindness

Why David Budbill Sits On A Mountaintop And Writes Poems

Leading up to the war, I doubted the value of anything but antiwar poetry. I thought all my nature poems were . . . well, stupid. But the moment the antiwar movement failed and the bombing began, I knew how important poems about birds and trees and loneliness and sex and food and joy were. I knew those little poems were weapons in the war for human kindness.

By Diana Schmitt
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Clinic

I thought the place looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure. I put down my plate of eggs, grabbed the TV remote, and turned up the sound. It was an abortion-clinic bombing: one bomb to lure the law, a second bomb to blow them up.

By Corvin Thomas
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

God Is Not Dead, He’s Busy Making Sure Nicole Kidman Wins Another Oscar

I was walking on the ice. Let me say up front that I am not a foolish woman, that the ice was thick and I was dressed warmly. Let me add that, though I do drink too much on occasion, I wasn’t drinking that morning. I’d just had one teeny-tiny hit of good pot. That was all.

By Sybil Smith
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Red Eggs

I am eleven, not quite a little girl, not quite a young woman. There are things I know that I should not know, things of which I am not to speak, such as: I am not supposed to know that my father is a checkout clerk, not the grocery-store manager. I am not supposed to know the dolls I play with are stolen.

By Angela Lam
Fiction

My Brother The Superhero

At dinner, Brandon — my son, your nephew — tells us how, on the kickball diamond today, he was called a pussy by Arthur, the decidedly overweight bully (as all second-grade bullies tend to be, complete with requisite learning disability). Since September, Arthur has developed an unfortunate interest in Brandon.

By Katy Williams
Fiction

Fallout

I used to be an expert on the atom bomb in the late fifties, thanks to Junior Scholastic magazine. Everyone in Mrs. Thompson’s fifth-grade class subscribed. We had to.

By Pamela Schoenewaldt