Category: non-fiction
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I Never Met An English Country Church I Didn’t Like
[St. John the Baptist, Buckthorn Weston, Dorset] It’s been said by many travelers that if one wants to know what’s happening in any small English village, just go to the pub and listen for an hour. I think the same is true, to a degree, of social life provided by the Church in these towns…
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Digging A Grave On A Beautiful Spring Afternoon
I stood in the soft loam, nine inches below ground level, leaned against my shovel, and thought about death and insects. This is not a difficult thing to do when you’re helping to dig a grave on a day in May when the gnats and flies are biting ankles and arms. After all, it is…
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The Preference For Fog On The Downtown Bus
The M1 bus stop where I was standing was on 5th Avenue and 98th Street. It’s across the avenue from Mount Sinai Hospital. It wasn’t raining…it was a downpour. My flimsy $5.99 umbrella protected my head and shoulders but little else. The front half of each shoe was soaked. My outside flap of the shoulder…
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From My Cradle To Her Grave
The first woman to see me naked is lying six feet down in the silt of the Susquehanna River. It’s a small cemetery in a small community…not even a town or village…just a cluster of houses several miles down river from the town where I grew up. On the last day of May, I will…
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A Chain Of Events Has No End
The judge cancelled the restraining order setting into motion a chain of events… I walked into my classroom on a September morning to meet my class for the first time. I looked around the room of faces, hands holding pencils, open notebooks and staring eyes. A chain of events was set into motion… One in…
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The Old Schoolmaster
You throw a pebble, a small boulder that you can barely pick up, or a grain of sand into a pool of water. If there is no wind, you can watch the ripples move out in perfect concentric circles, ever-widening. The tiny waves keep going until they reach an obstacle and they bounce off into…
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Arriving, Departing or Just Passing Through
I stood hard against the tiled wall and made room for the rush of human traffic trying to pass me. I was thinking about insanity and the blindness of powerful people to hold sacred something that once had beauty and class. Beauty and class are rare commodities these days. I was in the bowels of…
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Forever and a Day
Absolutely nothing lasts forever. Nothing lasts forever. There may be some things that last forever. One thing lasts forever. You’re waiting for me in the cafe. The place beside the old church and next to the cemetery. The only place in the city where I can sit next to the fire and feel warm…on…
