• DEAD OR JUST RESTING?

    Some people say religion is dead, or at least mortally wounded. In my generation, closer to death than puberty, there is some truth to that thought because God seems a whole lot less responsive these days, our peers beginning to fall like lemmings from the cliff. But the young clearly have found what has gotten…


  • ABRIDGED STORY

    On our first visit to Prague it was almost hard to imagine that this bridge was built to ferry people and traffic across the River. Now it is jammed with tourists and those for whom tourists are a ubiquitous market, and anyone needing to expeditiously cross the cranky water that every now and again must…


  • CULINARIA

    My repertoire was so much wider then for that is the mis-appreciated burden of youth. My bookshelves groaned under the weight of a couple of hundred cookbooks, tomes focused on the apple, fish, chicken, or on isolated corners of what seemed to me to be an infinitely large world. Azeri food seemed a continent apart…


  • A NIGHT AT THE ROSE

    Three beers over two hours and, giddy, I want to sing along with the Irish house band in my horribly off key voice, just two choruses of Irish Rover or Four Green Fields. It’s beginning to snow outside and it’s a four-block walk to the Government Center station. I suppose it would sober me up…


  • AND TODAY?

    He walks with what he considers a swagger. He will gladly stare you in the eye, and you will look away. He prides himself on constancy, knowing you will arrive each day, knowing you will bring nothing in response to his request. He’ll turn his back on you and ignore you once again. Then he…


  • ON ROMULUS

    For years all I wanted was a working familial cloaking device. The kind the Romulans had in the early days of Star Fleet. It was easy to feel overwhelmed amid them, teaming together for holidays, reunions. I never could, I never did disappear though she felt my sometime silence oppressive. Now that I am part…


  • YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED

    I received the invitation today, but I won’t be attending. I’m not inclined to RSVP, for that will only drive home the fact that I couldn’t afford to attend. They have to know this, and if they don’t, well… That really is their problem. My mother said you should always RSVP, yes or no, but…


  • RETURNING

    Time has no role to play in any of this. Time isn’t pleased by the prospect, it prefers to be ever present, ever escaping, even as it is arriving. It is quirky that way. It is constant yet it loves to give the impression of being variable. Einstein noted this, and anyone returning from a…


  • Maximum Exposure

    She carefully hangs her life on the tautly stretched line across her small back yard. A sun faded floral housedress a pair of bib overalls knees worn white on the kitchen linoleum, cracked and dingy. She waits patiently for Humphrey Bogart to arrive and carry her up the river of her memory. The chicken threatens…


  • FESTIVAL

    They ebb and flow like tides down the half-empty street from venue to venue, many with that lost look of years in the desert, driven on by promised the land of honey notes, the mother’s milk of jazz. The event passes flap in the breeze created by their wake, some checking programs, their personal map…