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Fear
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Winter Was The Season
I don’t like saying goodbye to the people I’ve worked with at The Sun — not after we’ve spent years together drinking too much coffee and meeting impossible deadlines and struggling to make the magazine better and trying to be better people ourselves. But sooner or later they leave. A spouse gets a job offer in another city, or graduate school beckons, or it’s simply time to move on. We promise to keep in touch, and often we do. So it’s goodbye, but not really goodbye.
December 1999Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Fears Of Your Life
Michael B. Loggins spends his days writing, drawing, and painting at Creativity Explored, a government-funded art center in San Francisco’s Mission District. The center hires developmentally disabled adults to create art and often publishes their work in the independent magazine Whipper Snapper Nerd. Publicity from the xeroxed-and-stapled publication has resulted in gallery exhibits in San Francisco, New York City, and Los Angeles.
December 1999Readers Write
Panic
A hundred benzodiazopines, a man in a red ski mask with a long knife, a small hole in a blanket
December 1999Fiction
Dr. Harris’s Residence
I remember being alone with my father only a few times. That person, a man, my father, was the tallest human. His hair was black, and darkness covered him in long, smooth suits, which now I recognize as beautifully tailored.
September 1999Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Before The Fall, The Fullness
My son Josh once wrote me a letter in which he described hiking alone in the mountains of Ecuador, fourteen thousand feet above sea level. The tiny lights of a village shone below him, and the snowcapped cone of a volcano was visible in the distance. “The stars and planets are incredibly low, large, and brilliant here,” he wrote. The tone of his letter was ecstatic, like Sufi poetry — love and immanence spiced with joy.
September 1999Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Falling Into Life
Over the past five years, as I have moved into the solidity of middle age, I have become aware of a surprising need for symmetry. I am possessed by a peculiar passion: I want to believe that my life will balance out. And because I once had to learn to fall in order to keep this life mine, I now seem to have convinced myself that I must also learn to fall into death.
September 1999Fiction
A Dog Named Hopi
I tried to tell myself that he only wanted to rape me. I thought of all the women down through the ages who had been raped and silently asked for their help. I asked their spirits to hover over us and lighten the dark corners of this man’s mind.
August 1999Fiction
Neighbors
Ordinarily, Marko Sakic walked the five blocks to work at his grocery store on the Street of Proletarian Brigades in Nizograd, Croatia, but these days he drove, because he didn’t want to face his neighbors in the streets. Croatia had recently declared its independence from Serb-ruled Yugoslavia, and, as a Serb, Marko didn’t know what this meant for him. He wanted to be inconspicuous.
August 1999Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Madman
The Lebanese village of Magdaluna, where I grew up, had none of the modern conveniences. It was stuck somewhere in the eighteenth century until after the Great War, when my father returned from the army with his beat-up radio. When I was a child, we had no running water in our homes, electricity was unheard of, and our toilets were holes in the ground way out in a field.
April 1999Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
And There Was Light
I felt indescribable relief and a happiness so great it almost made me laugh. Confidence and gratitude came as if a prayer had been answered. I found light and joy at the same moment, and I can say without hesitation that from that time on light and joy have never been separate in my experience. I have had them or lost them together.
February 1999
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