Category: Real Personal History
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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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Playing Scrabble On Facebook With Your Daughter: The Agony And The Ecstasy
There is on odious, evil and insistent karma that floats and follows me everywhere. Like gnats on a hot afternoon in the Adirondacks, they follow me about in my own yard to plague my very soul. Gnats (or is it the equally noxious black flies?) that have been known to drive a tundra dwelling musk ox…
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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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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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Don’t Cry For Me, Puerto Rico: My Final Postcard
If you want to use Google Earth to find me, just enter 18.44 N and 66.01 W. That’s me, sitting at the beach bar waiting for an order of nachos. I’ve licked my last stamp and stuck it to the corner of this postcard. I won’t be writing to you anymore–from this place. This is…
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Postcard From The Bottom Of The Green Lagoon
I have only one thing to do and that’s to be the wave that I am and then sink back into the ocean. Sink back into the ocean. Sink back into the ocean. –Fiona Apple. Theme from “The Affair” I know where my body is at the moment. I’m sitting on the sandy floor…
patrickjegan 