• ASHES

    When I die, my friend Larry said one morning in the third inning of a double header of stoop ball, I want to be burned, not that I intend it to happen any time soon, but when it does. They burned my grandfather I think it was Dachau, but unlike him, I want to kick…


  • A CALL

    The thing about it is it is so damn quiet I can hear myself think but I can’t think anymore. And I’ll tell you this box is so cold it just leaks air and water has seeped in. Somehow I expected more it isn’t at all what was promised and the stone is not set…


  • INSIDIOUS

    They come when you least expect them appear seemingly out of nowhere at first so small they go unnoticed but never unheard, for what they lack in size, they make up for in volume. The get beneath your skin, take root, steal into your heart, and find themselves in the brain’s synapses. Before long they…


  • HUH?

    The problem with youth isn’t that you misspend it, or even don’t appreciate it as it is happening, or even expect it to go on forever, for those would be the simplest hurdles to leap even at your now advanced age. The true problem with youth isn’t even those around you, grandchildren, high schoolers that…


  • AGING

    He is four today. He’s been practicing being four, so it is somewhat second nature. But he made a decision. Next year he will be five. He was going to be 27 next year, but decided that can wait another year. I asked him why he was delaying, he said, “You get better presents when…


  • MAGIC

    The money wasn’t really real then, it came in a box with a board, dice and property deeds, and it was in colors, one for each denomination, (kind of like and Canada and other countries). It was fun having a lot of it until the first time I snuck some out of the house and…


  • UNKNOWING

    I don’t know what                                                I am, the Buddha said. I don’t know why                                      …


  • FOR THE BIRDS

    She wants to know why the oriole we sometimes see in the park never visits our backyard feeder. I remind her that she isn’t usually here, only visits occasionally, but she says that I would have told her if I saw one. She says I got excited when I saw the one in the park…


  • EXPECTATIONS

    Nothing unexpected happened today. That, in itself, was entirely unexpected. On this and certain other days, you have to expect the unexpected. When that doesn’t happen you are left to ponder why what was logically expected went so unexpectedly wrong. Nothing unexpected should happen tomorrow. At least anything unexpected happening would be a truly unexpected…


  • PATER INCOGNITA

    He often comes to me in dreams. In most he is faceless, but intently present, speaking in a voice I instantly know, nothing like mine and totally mine. On occasion his face appears, blurred, as if seen through a scrim, back-lit, vague, an actor in some film I have seen, but yet not that person,…