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Letters To My Friends

Every time I take a book out of the library and the librarian consults the computer to determine my past crimes, I expect her to discover the Gary Snyder book I lost two months ago. But it never appears on the screen.

January 1998

Jesus stands at the end of the sentence. He extends his hand. I make my offering: something I can easily afford.

Sunbeams

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

Will Durant

The Living End

What I remember most about Sarah Collins is her face pressed up against the back window of the El Camino as the car sped down our street. A big hand was reaching over her forehead, trying to pry her from the glass. On the middle finger was a silver ring that caught a ray of sunlight. I squinted from the glare, and the car was gone.

Connecting A Few Dots

Without context, a piece of information is just a dot. It floats in your brain with a lot of other dots and doesn’t mean a damn thing. Knowledge is information in context — connecting the dots; making your own map.

October 1997

Let’s respect the heroes who live far from public sight: behind a battered desk in a legal-aid office; on a meditation cushion; in the kitchen at three in the morning, rocking a child who can’t sleep.

Fritz: A Fable

Fritz, a gray, wolflike German shepherd, howled so terribly at some intruder that his owner, Igor Lovrak, went into his larder and greased his great-grandfather’s rifle and thumbed gunpowder and bullets into the barrel before he dared walk out into the yard.

Small Acts

I like to picture my father, thirty years ago, standing in a half-built department store, with a hammer in one hand and a forty-five record in the other. The forty-five is Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walking.” My father is alone, it is early morning, and he is trying to decide what to do with the record, which he hates.

Finding Peace After A Lifetime of War

From the day I was born, I was trained to be a soldier, encouraged in the way I was brought up to hunt, kill, dominate, rule, and control my environment. My family life was a form of war, filled with anger and violence, which made it no different from that in most of the houses around mine.

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