Memoirs
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She Grieves
We visited a town in a nearby state this weekend and spent most of a day browsing through an enormous arts & crafts festival. We were walking in an alley when we saw a handsome German Shepherd tethered to a long leash in a yard. We stopped and spoke to the dog, at which point her owner saw us from her back door and came out to say hello. The lady was about my age and had a strong speech impediment. She also had a sweet and guileless personality. She explained that the dog’s name is Mollie, and that she was until recently a K-9 officer in the local police…
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Make The Man
I believe it was in the fall of 1984 when I visited Savannah, Georgia for the first time. I went with three other Marines to explore the old city. We were stationed at Parris Island and I was the only one in our quartet who was not a Drill Instructor. The four of us decided to take weekend liberty and check out the storied cemeteries and streets and pubs. I wanted to prowl through a city I’d heard so much about, and they wanted to be away from the bumbling mobs known as recruits. Two of my buddies were off that Friday, but one of them was still “on the…
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Poor Little Thing
She came to the office today, and this has been my only arena of contact with her for the years that I’ve been aware of her life. Her daughter always brings her, and together they pass through the doors meek and bowed and deferential, wearing the mien of learned helplessness, carrying the rooted resignation of their bloodline but lacking the grit. They see me as an authority, me — and no matter how soft or unassuming or passive I present myself to them, I have never been able to convince them that I am from their world, not the world of my employers. She wears knit gloves and a wool…
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Evening In The Tenth Month
As I write these words, I have a quilt over my legs. The cool night air is sifting through the screens on the windows and doors, and the crickets are scraping their little fiddles out in the yard, tuning up for their final concert of the season. I don’t yet know when the first frost will fall; it will likely be a bit later than normal, since we had such a lingering season of heat. But who can say? The earth in its tilting and turning trip around the sun may play a trick on us yet and dust us with the tiny crystals in a stroke of whimsy. All…
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Departures
The hummingbirds are migrating south now, and it seems that our regulars have already left. Last week, right in the middle of the repugnancy in the cellar, I had scrubbed and cleaned all the feeders and filled them with fresh nectar. The next day after doing so, I went out to watch the little things as they fed, but none were there. Since last Thursday, I have seen only one hummingbird, and he was a male with a very short bill that I have never seen before, probably a migrating fellow passing through and stopping off at a friendly place he’d heard about in some avian chatroom. I looked all…
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Seemed To Mock
The other morning, I kept watching the moon as I drove down the mountain to work. Waning in its phase, it hung in the air with just the bottom crescent illuminated. The image was like a photo negative of a smiley-face logo but with the eyes closed. The lunar face seemed to mock me as I stole glances at it. Looking back now from the vantage point of week’s end, the impression of mockery doesn’t seem so fantastical. That same night, my wife and I were relaxing after an arduous day when she wrinkled her nose and turned to me. “Do you smell that?” she asked. I took a breath.…
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The Magical Leaf
It’s one of those things in this region that holds on. You not only see people using it in its various forms, but also growing it, even in small, hillside or backyard patches. The farms near my home in any direction, dug into the rocky mountain soil, coax vegetable and grain crops each year, but a surprising number of them grow the devil’s lettuce. A country drive at this time of year will take one past leafy fields so pretty and so poetic, they make even a tee-tobacco-er want to stop and get out and gather an armful. This dedication to tobacco is not only understandable to me, but also…
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Between
On my walk this morning before dawn, my shoes marking my cadence on the gravel, the deer in the distance alerted by the measured stride of a two-legged creature, I was exactly between two heavenly bodies. At the country cemetery, I looked west and saw the moon hanging high above the kingdom she ruled during last night’s dark hours. And then I turned and went to the fence and looked east, and I saw the pockets of mist in the distant hollows of this chain of mountains, mist lit by the light crawling up from behind those peaks, and then in an instant the day had begun and the regal…
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Awareness And The Spirit
I arrived at work this morning like Bob Cratchit, in a post-holiday rush, behind my time, dithered in the head, fumbling with my keys. I spent the morning trying to catch up on backed-up tasks. But busy as I was, something in my spirit was troubled. As the morning wore on, I realized that I felt a crushing sadness in my very bones. What could be making me feel this way? I thought. And then it came to me. Five years ago today, my sister called me at work to tell me that our mother had died. My memory is not what it once was, but my spirit, my internal…
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The Map Of Scars
I dreamed of my daddy last night, which was unusual. I rarely dream of him, probably because I didn’t really know him at all, having only seen him less than forty times in my life. In the dream, I couldn’t see Daddy’s face clearly. This has been a lifelong pattern for me. So often, I will look someone full in the face in one of my dreams but the face will be blurred or occluded in some way. I can see the person from the periphery of my vision, but a direct gaze will immediately blur the center of my dream-vision. It is like mercury, forever running and shifting away…