Cold
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...
Read MoreChicken Noodle Soup Maiden
Nineteen fifty-nine was a year of great uncertainty. What about the Russians? Why so many TV Westerns? But in Stuart Nation, Philadelphia’s West Oak Lane neighborhood, I tripped over my own vexing questions like they were too-long shoelaces—all swirling around a girl in my fourth-grade class whose disinterest intoxicated me. I was a happily-chatty kid most of the time, except when I was around Carol, whose studied cool and blond, bowler-cut hair usually left me incapable of saying more than hello. To the actual Carol, that is; I shared some incredible phantom-afternoon interludes with...
Read MoreLunch, 1968
“This is important,” my buddy Walter bellowed one lunchtime across the chatter and clatter of Germantown High School’s vast cafeteria. “And I can only say it once.” The topic that day in 1965 was color—specifically, orange, the hue of a stack of cheese crackers piled high and majestic near the cash register. I’d questioned the wisdom of paying for food we each had access to at home, albeit connected to peanut butter in the form of Lantz snacks. Why buy them when we have them in our kitchens? “These crackers,” the tall, handsome 10th grader said in stentorian tones...
Read MoreOld Clyde and Mrs. Hill
When I was a young man, Dad lost everything to the bank: Jet Cleaners, a marriage, our home on Glenn Road, our predictable, idyllic, suburban routine. When we moved to town, my little sister and I were decrepit, worn out after the catastrophe. Now everyone was too close together. We staggered up the broken, treacherously icy stairs, careening like Laurel and Hardy in winter to the apartment, the sagging, exhausted house on West Gambier Street. Jo’s Chateau of Beauty was in the back, Hyle’s Typewriter Repair in the front, Kenyon and civilization five miles east, the flat, monotonous...
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