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Aging
Poetry
The World’s Oldest Person
has died. She attributed her longevity / to divorce and raw eggs, / which she ate daily. / A previous record holder / had no idea why she’d lived so long.
August 2018Photography
A Long Life
The rural people of Calabria, in southern Italy, live an unusually long time. The average global lifespan is about seventy-two years, but the residents of this sunny, mountainous peninsula often live into their nineties and beyond — and they suffer less from ailments like dementia and heart disease that typically affect the elderly.
August 2018
Poetry
In The Dermatologist’s Office, Again
The cancer he wanted / to cut out of my back / somehow disappeared / in the month / since the biopsy.
July 2018Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
In Praise Of Incompetence
That word, competence, came to me after my six-year struggle; it came as an alternative, if not an outright escape hatch, to the daily grind of despair.
July 2018
Fiction
The Narrows
My sister Nell and I were standing on the banks of the Duvallis River, waiting for a man to float down it.
July 2018
The Dog-Eared Page
For Eli Jacobson
There are few of us now, soon There will be none. We were comrades Together, we believed we Would see with our own eyes the new World where man was no longer Wolf to man, but men and women Were all brothers and lovers Together. We will not see it.November 2017
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Telling Time
We rent a condominium together, my eighty-six-year-old widowed mother and I. Sometimes she summons me from her bedroom at the end of the hall. I have learned to guess from her tone what it is she wants.
November 2017Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Art Of Aging
As you read this essay, you are aging. The older you get, the more you become an emissary from a vanished world — in my case, a world of black-and-white photographs taken by a Brownie camera, the sun bleaching the faces of the squinting subjects.
April 2017Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Still Running
Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to officially enter the Boston Marathon. She wasn’t looking to make history; she only wanted to run. But in 1967 the marathon was closed to women. So she entered as “K.V. Switzer” and ran in disguise for four miles until the race director, Jock Semple, jumped off the press truck and shouted, “Get the hell out of my race!” The picture of him trying to rip the number off her chest made headlines.
February 2017
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