Issue 184 | The Sun Magazine

March 1991

Readers Write

Going Out

A three-thousand-pound slab, a pair of sunglasses and a book, a sprouting of wings

By Our Readers
Quotations

Sunbeams

If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

Albert Camus

The Sun Interview

Men And Their Sorrows

An Interview With John Lee

Most men are afraid to stop working because if they do, they will have to confront their pain directly. A man who works twenty hours a week has time to consider his anxieties. A man who works forty to sixty hours a week can avoid looking at everything.

By David Lenfest
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Marvelous Adventure Of Cabeza De Vaca

In the days that followed, in my first desolate confrontation with slaughter, I saw a far-off light, heard a far-off strain of music. Such words serve as well as any: for what words can describe a happening in the shadows of the soul?

By Haniel Long
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Instrument Of The Immortals

Miss Eva Hodges, my piano teacher for eight years, now deceased, would be gratified to learn that I bought the Steinway. She’d be proud of me.

By Jake Gaskins
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Mistaken Identity

I want to love myself the way a stubborn question loves certainty, loves it in spite of itself.

By Sy Safransky
Fiction

The Wrong Peas

In every diner, there are those who insist the waiter explain the precise inner workings of a tuna-fish sandwich before they place their orders. I’m not one of them. By Robert Bordiga

Fiction

Finding Out About Your Heart

After twenty-five years in the courtroom, you only have to look at the foreman to know a jury’s mind. The doc’s expression tells you what he has found out about your heart.

By Candace Perry
Fiction

Plum Island

One of Quick’s students is fishing at the foot of the beach beneath the shack he rents on Plum Island. The dog wants walking. There is no escape. The girl’s name is Harley and she is barely passing Spanish.

By Michael Wade Simpson
Fiction

Sunrise, Montana

My God, he was a beautiful man. The way he sat on a horse. Or the way he rolled a cigarette. Charlie Freeman. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

By Myra Epping