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JUST LIKE US
We love nothing more than to anthropomorphize. It is one of our defining characteristics. It makes our lives simpler since we can relate more easily to people than animals or things. And after all, we did make God in our image, or is it the other way around? Does God deimorphize us? Anyway, we know…
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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…
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ALWAYS
There were always morequestions than answers.There were always morewrongs than rights.There were always morehungry ones than food.There was always moreanger than compassion.There were always moredays of war than days of peace.There were always moreself-righteous than righteous.There were always morepeople than this planetneeded or could support.
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STOP THAT
We love nothing more than to anthropomorphize. It is one of our defining characteristics. We cannot avoid it even if we try. We never try. It makes our lives simpler since we can relate more easily to people than to animals or things. And after all, we did make God in our image, or is…
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A FADED PHOTO
They stood side-by-sideas if frozen, adjacent butnot touching, two dollswhose hands were incapable of movement.They are expressionless, neitherstoic nor smiling as though the photographerwiped their faces free of expression.Grant Wood might have painted them,named his work Lithuanian Gothic.I want so to see the people behindthese facades, but I knowthat in 1934 a photograph wasa production,…
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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…
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ANTIPATHY
Some of his acquaintences said his problemwas that he constantly demonstratedantipathy toward people, toward things.He knew, of course, that was not thecase but he dared not say that lestthey use it as yet another exampleof his antipathy. The reason, he leftunsaid, was that he didn’t have antipathy,it was that such an emotionrequired feelings about things…
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GALWAY
I remember it as thoughit was yesterday, not eight years ago,the evening cool, the streetcrowded, the pubs along High Street:Freeney’s, The Front Door,Tigh Neachtain, Sonny Molloy’sstill warming up as the nighttightened it grip, the Guinnesswashed the taps, filled the pintsand people sat along the streetsome with guitars, one a bouzouki,and all with a song whichyou…
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BEAR WITNESS
Some like to say guns don’t killpeople, other people do.But no one I have ever heard ofhas been killed by a volume of poetry,although one man hit by a carcrossing the street without lookingdid have a small book, Howlby Allen Ginsberg, in his back pocket.How many have died by hateor anger this year alone, somenot…
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NONFAT CORTADO
There was a time when Iwould steal away for an hourand sit in the corner of my favoritecoffee shop, watching people.There would always be students,fidgeting in a hurry to besomewhere for which they are latebut dare not face uncaffeinated.There was an older man,his white and gray hair an absurdversion of the Friars of old,the man…