Issue 230 | The Sun Magazine

February 1995

Readers Write

Maps

An overwhelmed train traveler, an Interrail passenger using a Third Reich map, a map aficionado

By Our Readers
Quotations

Sunbeams

I never get lost because I don’t know where I’m going.

Zen master Ikkya

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Dale

Dale and I sit in opposite corners of the nearly empty McDonald’s where I come to grade freshman English themes — he by the front window and I in the back near the restrooms. Twenty years ago we worked together, but now Dale is homeless, and I pretend not to know him.

By Carol Estes
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Predator’s Garden

Until I started a garden, I never considered deer predators simply because I did not consider plants prey. As a transplanted city dweller, I imagined that sighting a deer from my living-room window was the blessing of a rural lifestyle.

By Jim Nollman
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Fathering The Night

Carrying the baby horizontally across my chest like a football usually calms him, and often puts him to sleep. But not tonight. He’s still crying, cycling through his whole repertoire: the screechy fear cry; the lower, throaty demand cry; the pitiable gasping interspersed with slobbery whimpers.

By Charles Goodrich
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

My New Neighbors

A new couple has moved into the apartment next door to mine in this ancient Victorian. They are using the same bed as the previous couple, Nicole and Peter, whose dramatic lovemaking I would hear quite clearly as their headboard pounded my living-room wall.

By Stephen J. Lyons
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

A Map From My House To Your House

You have probably never used a map like this before. Read it carefully, and know where you are starting from.

By Mary Sepulveda
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Capturing The Moment

It may not matter anymore where any of us have actually been. We can now visit our national parks by videocassette, in which, as one company offering such tapes promises, “the remarkable sights and sounds are preserved for you.”

By Keith Bromley
Fiction

Dance Lessons

My parents were dancers. Though practical and predictable in all else, they let their passions surface in the rumba, the tango, the dances that conjured up exotic places and smoldering emotions.

By Jill Wolfson
Fiction

Sleepwalking To My Sister

No one knows exactly when my sister disappeared. When I think of her now, a funnel, dark and deep, opens before me, echoing back her name: Victoria.

By Gillian Kendall
Fiction

The Window Seat

The man was coming down the aisle, swaying to and fro and knocking passengers with his simple bag as though he were on a subway rounding a curve.

By Henry Alan Paper