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Marriage
Readers Write
Turning Thirty
Hiking the Appalachian Trail, shoplifting, feeling grateful for being alive in this world of difficult beauty
January 2004
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Getting Away
After a cycling accident left my husband, Ralph, a quadriplegic, I had a furtive fear that, given the opportunity, I might bolt. I might up and leave him and all his problems. Like a deer avoiding an oncoming vehicle, I’d dash away and disappear forever into the safety of a thick, impenetrable forest.
January 2004
Sy Safransky’s Notebook
December 2003
I don’t want to read the word of Jesus today. I don’t want to read the words of Buddha. Words didn’t help last night when Norma told me how sad she was. I said all the right words. I know I did. Look at all my brave little soldiers, banners flying, rushing to the rescue, marching right off a cliff.
December 2003
Sy Safransky’s Notebook
March 2003
Middle age has been awkward, like adolescence, something to get through. Like a teenager walking out the door for the first time with his father’s car keys, I’m learning what it’s like to be old.
March 2003Fiction
Don’t Come Crying Home To Me
Dying looks a lot like being born, I think standing over him, my fingers resting gently on his broad back. The contractions come in waves. Each time they are more intense, start earlier, last longer. Only now the body itself is the womb you leave behind.
March 2003
Sy Safransky’s Notebook
February 2003
It’s temporary, I tell myself. Then I remember that’s true of everything: the blazing fire; our two gray cats; my lovely wife with her long graying hair. If only I never lost sight of this. If only I didn’t shut my eyes except to sleep.
February 2003Readers Write
Falling In Love
The accumulation of kind, affectionate gestures; black-and-blue finger marks; puppy love
February 2003Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Who Causes This Sickness?
Before Hippocrates and his Corpus — a collection of some sixty medical treatises that marked the birth of modern medicine — the ancient Greeks investigated illness by asking the question “Who causes this sickness?” The answer was often a capricious or malevolent deity. The Hippocratics dissolved this notion, professing instead the theory that the human body was comprised of four humors: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.
January 2003Sy Safransky’s Notebook
October 2002
When Norna mentioned to our neighbor Manny that we’d be going away soon to celebrate our nineteenth wedding anniversary, Manny, who’s been married fifty-two years, said, “It’s a good start.”
October 2002
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