https://youtu.be/IUK8emiWabU Sometimes lying in my bed in Brooklyn I think I hear a freight train horn. Half asleep, I picture the box cars clacking past out beyond street after street of brownstones, maybe as far as Prospect Expressway. But then I wake up enough to remember that no such train exists. By then, I don’t … Continue reading Waiting for the Caboose →

I heard the story many times about how my father was once stricken with a psoriasis flare-up over 90% of his body. This was Job-level suffering, a red, angry, excruciating rash over almost every inch of skin. Doctors photographed him for the record books. My mother described how all he could do was lay across … Continue reading I heard her call my name →

https://youtu.be/Qr0-7Ds79zo I had a terrible hangover one Saturday when I was going to visit my friend Dick at his new apartment on Park Avenue. One of those mystical hangovers that are beyond pain. An exquisite nauseous weirdness. Like you’ve died and turned into a zombie. You’re thinking, “This is what it feels like to be … Continue reading Hair of the Dog →

EASTER MEDITATION. The mind-boggling thing about Easter is how, for Christians, it is the celebration of a historical event. It is not just a celebration of the tradition of being Christian, a celebration of shared feelings and attitudes about life, shared music and culinary traditions. Christians are celebrating the actual reanimation of a human whose … Continue reading Easter Meditation →

I was in my late fifties before I experienced general anesthesia. My broken wisdom tooth got infected. It took a week or so before I knew that my tooth was the problem. The pain was shooting all over my skull, so I thought I had another pinched occipital nerve like the one that incapacitated me … Continue reading Anesthesia →

I once lived in an old house in Starkville, Mississippi. It had a porch. My apartment was at the top of some stairs that went up the side of the house. A young woman who drove a beaten-up Maverick lived behind the front door that opened onto the porch. Coming home one evening, as I … Continue reading My Spider Friend →

This is just a description of how my father said something funny that I and others have repeated for 50 years. He told us all that he had been at the new Kmart. It is worth saying that, at this time in the 1970s, Kmart was still new and exotic for us. There was a … Continue reading Toys, Toys, Line One →

Until my mother put her foot down, I got whitewalls at the barbershop as a kid, along with my two brothers. The barber shaved smooth the sides of my head around the ears with a straight razor. If I Google “whitewalls haircut” now, I find a literal explanation. On a light-skinned head, the shaving forms … Continue reading Whitewalls at Logan’s Barbershop, Maywood Mart →

When scientists describe the vastness of the universe, I think of a familiar “what if.” What if we’re just an atom in a grain of sand? Or something like that. What if our solar system is just an atom in a grain of sand? I think this idea comes from how diagrams of atoms look … Continue reading Does God Exist? →