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MISSED MEETING
On Saturday it will be21 years since I missedthe last chance to meet my mother.If this seems strange to youimagine how it is for me, how itit is to have your mother dieat 82 and you now 70saying you never got to meet.You’ve guessed correctly that Iam an adoptee, but did you knowI waited so…
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THE EASE OF FORGETTING
I have little memory of the manwho was my first adoptive fatherand none of his funeral, two-year-olds,my mother said, should notknow of death at that age.Nor did I attend my grandmother’s,she the mother of my second adoptive fatherbecause 12-year-old shouldn’thave the memory of funerals,according to my mother.I did attend her mother’s funeral,had to because I…
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A FAREWELL VISIT
My mother no longer visits mein my dreams, actuallyneither does for I’ve had two,the advantage or is itdisadvantage of the adoptee.None of my three fathersever paid a postmortem visit.It complicates things when allI know of my birth mother isfrom a college yearbook photo,but that is how she looked in thosefew visits after I discovered her.The…
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TO A FATHER, NEVER KNOWN
You were to be my prophetand you played Jonah one morningby clutching your chest at the sinkand dropping to the floor, dead.You left me to wanderthrough Ninevah, a beggartwice robbed of originground pulled from beneath my feet.Why did you flee your taskthe one for which you were anointed.Couldn’t you see our home laid ruinconsumed by…
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MIND
It takes so little to take you back. It takes no thinking but sensing to take you back.You catch an aroma of a fresh baked pie and you are thirteen and baking for the first time, apple with a lattice top for a parent soon back from the hospital. A song played in memory of…
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AND EVERYWHERE
Where was my family from?Russia and Poland, mostlyby way of England and Austria,within nervous stop at Ellis Islandjust before the great warchanged everything for all time.Actually not. Not mostly Polandor Russia, the war not a changeof anything really, at mosta precursor of a greater war.You, too, questioner, may be dead nowspeaking from a plot in…
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DAIZUI’S KALPA FIRE
If you ask your teacherif the catin Schrodinger’s boxhis dead,he will saythe cat is dead .If you ask your teacherif the catin Schrodinger’s boxis dead,he will saythe cat is not dead.Dead and not dead ,both the same A reflection on Case 30 of the Book of Equanimity (従容錄, Shōyōroku)
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ONE MORE, MORE
That there is another shootingcomes as no surprise,it is commonplace now, expectedand there are only questions:how many this time, whatkind of weapon was used, whatmotivated the shooter to do it. What does it say when we definemass killing as requiring threeor more dead bodies in one place. The body of the single victimis no less…
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GOOD RIDDANCE
I still marvel at the waythe mind can rewritethe narrative arc of memories,taking away sharp edges,eroding or erasing sometoo painful to relive, andbringing others outfrom deep storage, somelargely forgotten, to bebattled with in dreams,demons wrestled to submission. In my dreams I have hada final conversation withmy step-sibling, whotold me of my father’sdeath in a text…
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AND PEACE?
Santayana said, “Only the deadhave seen the end of the war.”We have grown adept at wars,no longer global in scope, butubiquitous in frequency. Mine was fought in the ricepaddies of Vietnam, and on thecampus where we struggledvaliantly and vainly to protest,and when that failed, in the heatof Texas, marching about, goingthankfully nowhere, shippedto Niagara Falls…
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an old writer and his words 