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Sunbeams

I don’t want you to follow me or anyone else. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in, somebody else would lead you out.

Eugene Debs

School Days

Cold germs, Class 4-409, Gerard

David Kemsmier: Scenes From Childhood

Many families possess tales of their occasional flirtations with opulence. Ours concerns Great Grandpa Kemsmier. Short of cash, he decided to sell his small matzoh business. The new management expanded into wines and other kosher delicacies — changing the company name to Manischewitz.

English Lessons

“Oh.” I couldn’t bring myself to say it — not yet. But she knew I’d understood and continued cheerfully. “Sometime we dig, we find a body — a hand, a foot. One student find pop — then he buried there, too.”

Sunbeams

“I can’t believe that,” said Alice.

“Can’t you?” the Queen said, in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath and shut your eyes.”

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”

“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Editor’s Note

Iowa Diary

I often feel, in this mixture of silence, isolation, ignorance and pettiness, that if I were struck by a virus, I wouldn’t fight it; I’d give up and implode and disappear. Dangerous signals, those. Not that I will put any effort into taking my life — I feel in large measure that it’s already taken. So I have to leave this place, and fight to get it back.

Favorite Magazines

Muckraking, infamous mergers, the Jeffersonian ideal

Something Does Push The River

David Spangler On Community And Commitment

The Christ is the manifestation of a basketball passing through the table of our universe. It’s a multidimensional event which we are trying to grasp four-dimensionally. We would see it as history, as a succession of events. Which means that the event is still happening. It is not in history, it is history, it is still happening. We are in the midst of it at this moment. I don’t know just where we are along the basketball.

Fugitives

I arrive late, as usual, paper ends flapping from my briefcase, crumbs clinging to my coat after a crackers-and-cheese lunch between stoplights. Picking my way across the muddy yard from my parking place in a tow-away zone, I glance at the glassed-in central staircase of the high school to check the time.