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Politics
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The House Painters Of Southern California
There is a movement afoot in Congress, and along our southern borders among civilians dressed in fatigues, to keep illegals out. There is a desire to empty the job sites of workers; to shoo away the craftsmen who build and decorate these mansions; to punish them for their late-night crossings. I am a house painter, not a politician. If this were to happen, I see fifty years of painting experience out the door. And that is just within our group.
June 2008
Sy Safransky’s Notebook
May 2008
The universe will let me know when I’ve worn out my welcome. Until then, why don’t I make myself at home?
May 2008Readers Write
Chance Encounters
Thirty-fifth high-school reunion, fly-fishing, the 1960 World Series
May 2008
Sy Safransky’s Notebook
April 2008
When I depend on what I know, I never get very far. As the meditation teacher Stephen Levine writes, “The mind creates an abyss, but the heart crosses it.”
April 2008Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
War Of Words
It’s an evil day when there’s no coffee in the teachers’ lounge at 8 A.M. and it’s so cold outside I could see my breath in the parking lot on the way in. I’m a poetry teacher, and this morning I’ll be visiting two fourth-grade classes. I’ve brought with me a poem called “Sweet like a Crow,” by Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient.
April 2008
Sy Safransky’s Notebook
February 2008
I didn’t want to go to the antiwar rally last night; I had too many things to do. But I always have too many things to do. I asked myself: Am I really too busy to exercise my right of dissent? Use it or lose it, Democracy whispered.
February 2008Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
In My House
When I first heard that President George W. Bush would be making an Earth Day speech at Laudholm Farm, a sixteen-hundred-acre nature reserve near my home in Wells, Maine, it seemed as if a tainted bubble of exploitation had descended on the place, something especially unclean and dishonest.
January 2008
Sy Safransky’s Notebook
November 2007
My father’s parents, who lived with us throughout my childhood, fled Russia in 1905 to escape poverty and the state-sponsored massacres of Jews, called pogroms. They told me about the elation they’d felt when, after an arduous three-week ocean journey, they’d glimpsed the majestic statue in New York Harbor for the first time.
November 2007
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