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Compassion
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
my heart went out
my heart went out, M. then there you were, nowhere visible, yet present in a way that made me turn to the spring snowflakes and whisper, live forever.
December 2010
Sy Safransky’s Notebook
August 2010
Someone sent me a bumper sticker that reads, “Nonjudgment day is near.” It can’t come soon enough. For even though I’ve learned the importance of nonjudgmental awareness, I still turn nonjudgmental awareness into a goal, then judge myself for not being more nonjudgmentally aware.
August 2010Poetry
Selected Poems
— from “A Pittsburgh Poem” | Imagine a man in a hat on a street early one morning in autumn. / This is my grandfather on his way to work at the brokerage firm. / He is a treasurer. He takes the bus down from the southern hills. / It is October 28, 1929.
February 2010Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Taking A Life
It was a brilliantly sunny October day, and I was driving on Route 100 alongside Vermont’s White River when the driver of the logging truck in front of me slammed on the brakes. I stopped just in time to avoid a collision and saw a great animal floundering in the middle of the road up ahead. Someone had hit a white-tailed deer, a doe.
September 2009
Fiction
The Aftermath Lounge
Catch stepped out of his trailer and saw the girl alone on the beach across the highway. She was wading ankle deep in the gulf, wearing a light brown bikini the color of her skin. Catch hadn’t seen anyone on the beach in a long time, not since the hurricane, the one most people in town couldn’t stand to call by name anymore.
December 2008
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Future Zarahs
The Peace Corps doesn’t send volunteers to the countries where we work, those anarchic Fourth World places where the globalization beast barely pauses to wipe its lips — places like Sierra Leone in 2004.
September 2008
Quotations
Sunbeams
January 2008After twelve years of therapy my psychiatrist said something that brought tears to my eyes: “No hablo inglés.”
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