A man with the right scruffed-up beard and breadth of chest swaggered into the S and M dungeon that was my place of business, and twenty minutes and one grand later had my chin — still soft with the downy fluff of teen-girl skin — held steady in one paw while the other one flew at my face so hard and fast that I ceased to exist as the same collection of matter I had been the previous instant.
When Sarah’s mother, Penny, got sick four years into our marriage, we decided to move back to Mississippi, considering it penance for the sins of our youth. We signed a lease on a house, a white one-story on the historical register with a wraparound porch and angels, stars, and the moon painted on the transom above the front door.
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Since Sy Safransky founded The Sun in 1974, his essays have appeared in the magazine. Thirty of his best are collected in Four in the Morning. “This guy is absolutely naked on the printed page,” writes the Asheville Citizen-Times. “No pretension, no elevated ideas, just one man's responses to the world around him and the people he loves.”
Table of ContentsX
Bitter Medicine
Dropping Out
Generations
Adding On
Ashes To Ashes
Pornography’s Child
Selling Out
Some Enchanted Evening
The Writing On The Wall
Hand In Hand
Baby Fat
Between The Lines
Last Words
Enemies Of Freedom
By The Beautiful Sea
Easy Answer
The Shadow’s Speed
Breathing Space
Roads
Company
Trail’s End
The Man In The Mirror
Of The Brave
The Sky’s The Limit
Refrain
Home Is Where
Native Tongue
This Body
Graduation
Legacy
Read an ExcerptX
Selecting my favorite essays has been like trying to herd thirty rowdy kids onto a bus. They were written to stand on their own, they insisted. Each was unique, each deserved a window seat. Then, too, just about all of them showed up with extra luggage that needed to be left behind. That’s when they discovered they weren’t so unique: certain themes repeated themselves, a few images had slept around.
Read them as you would a sheaf of letters from a friend, making allowances for the coffee stains and loopy handwriting and words crowded together at the end of the page: it’s been a bumpy ride. Careful editing has made the pieces slightly more readable, but I didn’t want to be too careful; written over a period of nearly ten years, the essays reflect different answers to questions that themselves kept changing.
For giving Four In The Morning such an elegant look, thanks to designer Sue Koenigshofer. For help with editing, I’m grateful to my wife Norma as well as Dana Branscum, Terry Toma, Jan Bellard, Pamela Penick, Jeff Qualls, and Cassandra Sitterly. Valuable suggestions also came from Elizabeth Rose Campbell, Carol Logie, Sam Gaines, Cindy Calderwood, and Diana Hall. With so many cooks bent over one stewpot, you’d think I could blame someone else for any mistakes, but responsibility is mine.
Sy Safransky
The great teacher Marpa was grieving. His oldest son had been killed. One of Marpa’s students came to him and said, “I don’t understand. You teach that all is an illusion. Yet you are crying. If all is an illusion, then why do you grieve so deeply?” Marpa replied, “Indeed, everything is an illusion. And the death of a child is the greatest of these illusions.”
I saw a movie recently, a comedy, “Lost In America,” about a young couple who decide to quit their jobs and spend the rest of their lives roaming around the country.
I’m being as quiet as I can. The children are asleep in the next room and I don’t want to wake them. I thought of going to the office for a while, getting back before they wake up, but that’s hard to do; even when they’re asleep I want to be near them. The time together is so brief: one week each month. I keep thinking this will get easier. It does, in a way. We get used to everything.