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Poverty
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Jar Of Coins
The cold glass jar felt good in my pudgy seven-year-old hands. It had once been filled with hard candies wrapped in brightly colored cellophane, a gift from one of my dad’s clients. Sitting on our back deck on a Colorado summer afternoon, I wondered what I should fill the jar with now that all the candy was gone.
March 2008
Fiction
Trash
It didn’t occur to me until recently that if I’d seen my mother and Al going to the graveyard, then Miss Lottie had seen them too. Anyway, one day Miss Lottie called me “trash.” I was ringing up her wine, Mogen David 20/20. People call it “Mad Dog.” It’s cheap and strong, and Miss Lottie bought it at least three times a week.
September 2007
Fiction
Cuba Libre
Halfway through the first day, we passed an army caravan. Father said they were going to the Sierra Maestra mountains to kill Fidel Castro, “the enemy of Fulgencio Batista and General Motors.” I knew nothing then about Batista’s dictatorship and Castro’s attempts to overthrow it.
May 2007
Poetry
The Word That Is A Prayer
One thing you know when you say it: / all over the earth people are saying it with you; / a child blurting it out as the seizures take her, / a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital.
April 2007Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Free Spirits
I have walked the few blocks down to the pond on campus tonight because I read in the paper that some Buddhists from the local sangha are going to free the souls of a lot of people who were bombed at Hiroshima.
April 2007
Poetry
An Anthology Of Chinese Poetry
“All has come to nothing,” he writes. / In old age his clothes are tattered and thin, / His hut without a door; sick, / He suffers bad dreams.
April 2007Readers Write
Neighbors
Buddhists and nudists, Peace Corps volunteers, Quakers spinning in their graves
June 2006
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
World of Trouble
The place in New Orleans, Louisiana, where I went to give plasma looked like it had recently been a small grocery store. I had never given plasma or blood before and had no appreciation for the difference. All I knew was that you got eight bucks, which was the going rate for a full day’s labor through Manpower back then, in 1974.
February 2006Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
What Feels Like Destiny
There were seven thousand Peace Corps volunteers out there, in the most remote places of the world, and if something bad were to happen to any one of them during the night, something tragic, I would take the call.
February 2006Sy Safransky’s Notebook
October 2005
“We can’t forget,” my friend C. said. “Forgetting what happened to the people of New Orleans will exact too high a price. We can’t just send off a check, and cry again over the images, and pretend there’s nothing left for us to do.”
October 2005
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