Those Unheard Are Sweeter
“Where do you go?” The question echoes in my mind as if sounding through a cavern. It’s annoying as an alarm clock. If I could only swat a snooze button and silence the interruption. “Dear,” my wife says with fading patience, “the Millers drove all this way to meet us, and you’re ignoring them.” I snap out of it and recognize Bailey’s Tabard Inn, the restaurant that my wife, Barbara, and I frequent. At the table sits another couple, Alison and Geoffrey Miller. I work with Geoff at the university. In fact, we share an office because we’re literature professors. He...
Read MoreThe Higher Learning
The road north from the University town passed among fields and pastures. Along the way were one or two gas stations and a cluster of modest homes built for returning World War II veterans. I especially remember the cows that roamed the pastures, often close to the road. But more important to me, the road was plied by motorists willing to give a hitch-hiking college boy a lift. I was easily identified as a student by my books. I carried a loose-leaf binder with my needed books hooked to it. In those days, textbooks were modest in design and easily carried. On this one particular evening,...
Read MoreBoth Sides Now
Thrice I jumped on the frozen river to make sure it was frozen, the river; so the kids would not fall into it and one by one freeze or be taken by the hard draft travelling. I could see it travelling its way down below, where my feet lay. Not only was I walking on thin ice, I was jumping and thumping all over it, but I was fine and it would be fine. It always was. Someone had to do it, and this someone was always Sally Marlow, ice rink and ice rink expeditions’ manager when Bo wasn’t there (and, see, Bo was never there). Once we were sure the ice was thick enough, the children got on...
Read MoreCold
My whole life changed when I was 15. Everything I thought I would become. The future I thought I had. All gone. And I had such promise. I was a swimmer. Nebraska State champion in three events as a Freshman. I was going to go to college. Maybe the Olympics after that. But that all ended one blistery February day. It had been sleeting that morning, and the wind was howling out of the north. Mom picked me up from swim practice in the old grey bus from the nursing home where she worked. She was late, as usual. The second I staggered through the door of the bus, two things hit...
Read MoreBlack
There were wolves in the forest because there were wolves on the beer steins. “No,” his father said. “If Hitler did one good thing it was to kill all the wolves.” “Hitler didn’t kill the wolves,” his mother said, “and he didn’t do anything good.” “It’s a joke,” his father said. “It’s not funny,” his mother said. His mother had pink cheeks like the Hummel dolls she kept on a shelf. When his father said something she didn’t like, her cheeks became brighter. Her cheeks became brighter when his father said he was going to make her wear lederhosen and...
Read MoreCohen’s Resurrection
The address read 615 Calle de Ignacio. To the casual eye, it was rather unremarkable; just an old dilapidated brick building, entrenched among seedy waterfront bars and makeshift warehouses which lined the Montevideo ship yards. For the last several years the building had served as a hotel to the disenfranchised: the outcasts and those whose pasts were forever sealed within the confines of this dwelling. After W.W. II, these “tenants,” many of whom came from Europe, poured into various South American countries, leaving behind them their nightmarish histories, be they the victim or the...
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