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KODACHROME
There was a time once when your day on any tour to Europe or Asia was aim frame click pray and wait. Now it’s aimclicksavenext repeated endlessly until, once again home, you have hundreds of prayers unanswered.
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NICE JOB
It is stall after stall of tomates de Provence, choux wishing to be kale, peches, small and barely containing their juice. Courgettes beckon, pommes de terre call out their aerieal cousins, haricots quietly suggest a citron aussi. Walking along the boulevard a tourist obviously, without bags or cart, I get polite nods that say me…
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IN SOLITARY
A solitary lentil wrapped in its sauce mantle, having escaped the fork for the duration of the meal, stares up at me, perhaps defiantly my wife suspects it is merely bored at having been moved around so. I stare back at it in what I hope is my most threatening look as the waiter hovers…
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ARF
Sitting on the fourth shelf from the top, in the second rank of bookcases in my office is a somewhat worn copy Dylan Thomas is “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.” I can’t admit to ever having read it, or an ability to now recall if I did, but I know I’ve had…
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CHANNELING
I am swimming strongly, easily my strokes powerful, gliding over the waves that seemed to collapse beneath me. The water is surprisingly warm not the frigidity I expected, more like a now tepid tub, but left too long. I can glance up and see the other side and it is approaching rapidly. This will be…
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HELL’S PRISONER
I am pressed into a seat that would conform only to the body of some alien creature, or so it seems, for hours into a flight that increasingly seems eternal, particularly for the baby two rows back, who, like me would much rather be anywhere else. The crew dims the cabin lights the universal indicator…
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ENFOLDING
As a child I was quite adept folding sheets of newspaper into paper hats and paper boats. The boats immediately took on water, and sank like the sodden masses I made them to be, but I could wear the hats for hours, until my mother had to scrub my forehead to get off the printer’s…
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WITH THE GREATEST CARE
She looks carefully, not wanting the others to know what she sees, for she needs her secrets. She wanders over, the others follow totally unaware she has a goal, that she will not be satisfied until she attains it, and that she has a determination that would give them pause and no small measure of…
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THE VILLAGES
You are driving through the Florida that once was, that is off the coast, and out of Orlando, the Florida of jalousie windows, run down once gas stations and the more than occasional double wide. Suddenly, you are in a Disney version of a semi-tropical New England, gated villages where cars have been supplanted by…
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an old writer and his words 