• SATORI

    The empty wine bottle nestling the foot of the postal box wants nothing more that to speak its mind but it is forsworn to silence, and stares into the old Maytag box tucked in the alley next to the dumpster. The bedraggled man sits against the wall and debates the meaning of knowledge with the…


  • THE AUTUMN OF SPRING

    Spring has arrived, however begrudgingly, and the young woman pushes the older woman’s wheelchair along the paths of the great park. Neither speaks, but each knows this could be the last time they do this. That shared knowledge paints each flower in a more vibrant hue, each fallen petal is quickly but individually mourned for,…


  • FUGUE

    The name on the door says Richard Strauss though the lack of music emanating from within the room suggests he may be napping or off doing something more important than entertaining those of us out in the hall of the nursing home. It’s no surprise, he’d be in a home now, more odd that he…


  • AGING GRACELESSLY

    To know the road ahead ask those coming back. — Chinese Proverb I have progressed to the point that I no longer mark time in neat segments based on rotation of this world about that, now I am measured against those around me, I seek those with whom I share an age. It is best…


  • AGING

    She would have been, what … does it matter anymore, frozen in time at that last age before time ceased to matter and images became locked and only the viewer grew older but glad at least for that. The only thing worse than getting older is not she once said, then as was her fashion,…


  • AT THE MARGINS

    Horizons are the thing we have they greatest trouble with. They are omnipresent, immutable and yet move at our approach. They are at once inviting and fear inducing, though now we are largely convinced they do not mark the edge of a precipice over which we would catapult into some endless abyss crossing their margin.…


  • REVISION

    She said, “As we get older we start to come from the place we only wished we were from, and the place from which we came, becomes the place from which we are now glad we never visited.” He said, “As I age, my youth changes, and the things I say I did are increasingly,…


  • REFLECTING

    There was a time, once, when in the mirror I saw a young face, but the smile then is the same as that of the old man who greets me early every morning.


  • TIME’S ARROW CURSED

      He will be 90 in a few weeks. He doesn’t think this is possible. He says he wasn’t supposed to live this long. He asks again how old he is. You’re still 89, I tell him. He has a relieved look on his face. Then he smiles at me, says, that means you are…


  • OLD MEN

    It is always odd watching older men gather, talk about their lives, about how much they no longer remember, of last year, and a decade ago, about the infinite details they can clearly recall about the time they spent in the Army, Navy, Air Force, the smell of Slop-on-a-shingle, of field stripped butts in a…