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Trees

New neighbors, the sack of Rome, a treehouse in the Cascade Mountains

The Nosebleed

When the children were small and woke with fear in the night, they came into our room and stood breathing quietly by the side of the bed, waiting. They never waited on Dan’s side, but always on mine.

Sunbeams

It is not your obligation to complete your work, but you are not at liberty to quit.

The Talmud

Bubble-Boggled

Of The Brave

Bob’s friend Ken was supposed to meet him at the Internationalist around nine that very night. But when Ken opened the creaky screen door, he found Bob sprawled on the floor, bleeding and unconscious. He’d been shot in the head. Ken called for an ambulance and the police, and Bob was rushed to the hospital, but he never regained consciousness. He died the following day.

Celebrating A Massacre

U.S. bomber pilots destroyed or incapacitated eighteen of Iraq’s twenty electrical power plants. The link between that and children dying today was explained by the Harvard team: “Without electricity, water cannot be purified, sewage cannot be treated, waterborne diseases flourish, and hospitals cannot cure treatable illnesses.”

Quaking

The landfill under the office where I work holds the decomposed bones of old ships and piers, derelicts not worth repairing, sunk in the harbor. Our building has piles sunk straight down to bedrock, supposed to keep us standing when the ground all around quivers and liquefies.

Birthdays

A waxed floor, a box of chocolates, a first bra

The Sixties

Investigating conscientious-objector status, attending a rock festival, plucking strychnine tufts from a bag full of peyote buttons

Sunbeams

If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

Albert Camus