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Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories
The Depression Years: Costly Memories
Being of the “old school,” the subject of money affects me in a different way: memories of depression years, five cent apples sold on the corners, bread lines, cold winters without coal, hot summers without a fan, sweat shops and no money for trolley fare to go to the beach and cool off.
July 1974The Unthinkable Contract
It was one of those days that appear in endless number to those who look for work. Those days are numb and temperatureless, their color a shade of dull empty blue, and not grey as would seem the case. One walks past the bank on the way and notices the smart girls going in the back door to work, their dress, its neatness, and sharpness, remains a very real impression.
July 1974
Money
Money, or, as Karl Marx’s mother puts it, “If Karl, instead of writing a lot about capital, had made a lot of it . . . it would have been much better.”
July 1974
The Good Times
Here I am, at the end of another long-term relationship. This time seems easier than the last, but I can’t really tell — time blurs my memory out of focus.
June 1974Flying And Diving, Shucking and Jiving — There Is No Other Life But This, But What Is This?
Susan says she is not a religious person, but she has a high regard for religion, and she doesn’t like to see it downgraded or made fun of. And Saul Alinsky, a Chicago “social activist” said that “Seeing is Believing” should be taken a lot more literally.
June 1974Cooking With Love
The only thing that’s written about more than food is love. What we eat has the potential to nourish or destroy, to cheer or depress, to excite or to bore, and the way a person cooks is as distinctive as the way he or she writes, sings, dances, paints.
June 1974Sy’s New York Diary: Amazing Flesh
I read, in the newspaper, about a man who is dragged from his car, knifed repeatedly for the few dollars in his wallet, and left bleeding in the gutter. My mother says her friends don’t go out at night. It’s an old story, old as the city’s tired and dour expression, old as the dry and wrinkled hands of a man trying to remember better days and remembering nothing but bone.
June 1974On Consumption
Thinking about food gets me thinking of consumption in general. How much is enough? Consumption without creation is depressing. People ain’t trees, and the food energy they take in ain’t meant to feed a sedentary entity. But the pressures sure are great, of satanic proportions, even, to consume, consume, consume. I’m all right as long as I think of that which I consume as a tool, a fertilizer, a catalyst. The higher the quality of my consumption, the more rapid my ascent to KRSNA’s side.
June 1974
The Food Co-Op: After The Revolution
“It’s not the hurdles that hurt horses,” a friend once said. “It’s the hammer, hammer, hammer of the hard highway.” And that’s kind of the way it is these days at Chapel Hill’s oldest and largest food cooperative.
June 1974
Chewing It Over
Yom Kippur. The Jewish Day of Atonement. Along with my family, I used to fast, on this holy day, to expiate my sins, to assure that God would mercifully grant me yet one more year, during which, along with my family, I might sit every night before the TV, eating enough fruit and cookies to feed the whole block.
June 1974
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