an old writer and his words

  • BONE CHINA

    Mother loved her bone china.She went out of the way to insurethat her first husband bought a completeset for her, service for twelvenever mind she never had a tablethat could seat more than eightand then only then if you crowdedmismatched chairs together.She gave it to me after her secondmarriage finally dissolved, not onlybecause I was…

    Lou Faber

  • YOU

    This year, just before Thanksgiving we will have been together for a quarter of a century, which sounds more elegant than saying twenty-five years. That will be more than a third  of my life, if only barely, but when I stop to think that I have spent almost a third of my life sleeping, the third I have spent…

    Lou Faber

  • SEPARATING

    We sometimes speak of continentspulling apart, land bridges severed,the route taken to get here now gone,no going back, no back to go to.The continent of my youth, myyoung adulthood is gone, recededinto the fog of fading memory, and Iam now a prisoner of sorts on thisnew continent of life, moving evermore quickly to an unavoidable…

    Lou Faber

  • GROUND HOLD

    She sits in the middle seat of an oversold DC-9, Carhartt jacket and watch cap pulled tightly over her hair, a blond wisp slipping out the side. She cradles on her lap a tawny brown Stetson with a tooled leather and silver hat band. “It’s never goin’ in an overhead, my fiancee’d go up there…

    Lou Faber

  • FOREVER HOLD YOUR PEACE

    When a marriage comes apartas so many do, it seems,there is always someonewatching from the sidelineswho, while not being asked,offers up an “I knew thiswould happen from the start.”The “I told you so’s” pointingto a moment in the heartof the now doomed marriageare irritating enough, butthe “I knew it’s” are unforgivable.And when it happens so…

    Lou Faber

  • PHOTOGRAPHER

    Photographers we know are struggling,the wedding business has dried up, dessicatedby the years of the pandemic, the tighteningof matrimonial cost belts, no doubt other reasons.Wedding photography is hard on both the coupleand those with fingers on the shutter button.I cannot remember by first wedding, the marriageitself thankfully fading as well with the freedomof time, the…

    Lou Faber

  • INCARNATION

    I had been sitting for an hourin the coffee shop areaof the now gone Borders bookstoretrying to piece together the shardsof a life shattered by the impendingend of a long marriage that wasgoing to last for a lifetime.And I was hoping, perhaps,to meet someone, ready or not,to try and fill the smallest cornerof what was…

    Lou Faber

  • THIS IS WHAT IT IS

    It happened unexpectedly,but then perhaps it always happensunexpectedly, though in my firstthirty year effort it never fully happenedand its momentary flickerswere no more than quickly fading embers.This time it happened early on,arrived without warning, thentook up residence and broughtwith it a silence where breathsgrew synchronous and words,our stock in trade, were renderedsuperfluous, synapses magically linked.And…

    Lou Faber

  • RECENT MEMORIES

    Looking through your wedding albumtwenty years after a midlife marriageyou are quickly awash in emotions.There is the joy of the moment, magnifiedduring the succeeding years, andthe rekindled memories of peopleand moments of the day forgottenor lost in the tumult that is attendanton any wedding, first or second.But there is a deep sadness as well,at those…

    Lou Faber

  • FOR THE DEPARTED

    I have a good friend wholikes to say that divorce isthe worst thing you can experience.He has never married, we allnote, and wonder if it is becauseof a fear of divorce or of failure.Those of us who have beenthrough the sausage mill that ismore than a metaphor for divorcewould tell him that divorceis a return…

    Lou Faber