Category: My Memoir
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Skylarking, and Scotfree
Since you’ve heard bits and pieces, I should gather in one place an honest account of my bad deeds that were done before I was of legal age. By the mercy of God I escaped justice. Pine Bombs With pine sap and flat sandstone rocks you can make an explosion in the woods, and when…
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Pack’s Market
In about 1967, the Summer Of Love elsewhere, we moved to a leafy city block in a new town. I was 11 and always barefoot, even when running down the gravel alley to the little grocery on the corner. I was proud of my calloused soles. I could sprint that sharp, white, hot gravel all…
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Daisy (2009-2022)
(January 17, 2009 – May 21, 2022) Daisy went to sleep yesterday. I held her head as she faded, first from the anesthetic then as her heart stopped, invisibly, from the second syringe. I last saw her from above as I stood up to leave the veterinarian’s exam room. She was stretched out prone, chin…
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Pentecostal Geese
(February 2000) The Ohio river is up in the fields. Geese are gathered at the waters edges, like old Pentecostal women at a baptism. As if the flood itself spawned flocks and flocks, the way ancient bearded thinkers thought garbage spontaneously spawned mice. The standing water stains the black corn stalks left from the autumn…
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I Love You, Sambo
I wish we had a better place for dogs to die into. The Christian bible gives us no afterlife for them, no dog paradise where we can imaginatively park them forever in the bliss they deserve, and so park our pain. But we want them to go to heaven, so much that we imply as…
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Clocks Stuck In 1937
On the front wall of each classroom, above the teacher’s head, was a large clock framed by carpenters into the plaster wall. There were a couple dozen classrooms in the building, all with identical clocks, and all their black hands were stopped on white faces at the same clock time. We were told they were…
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Christina Fawn
March 25, 1952. “Christena” Before me, my parents had a daughter, Christina Fawn. Christina lived a few hours, then was gone. She is buried near her mom and dad’s grave, on the knoll above Rockhouse Holler, under a simple headstone befitting a baby. On the stone is carved her simple name. I can’t really miss…
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California Coast, And Other Beauties
Isaac, you asked: “What’s one of the most beautiful places you’ve ever been?” One is hard to choose. But… You’ll remember when we drove the California Coast, in bright June, when you were not yet a teen. We flew 5 hours to San Francisco, grabbed a rented car, and took off northward into the Marin…
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Christmas Day, 2022
I saw winter birds today and for the first time ever felt no urge to know their names or nesting habits. Movements of their heads were movements of their heads. And once one word is dropped away all talking follows into sleep. Civilization seems a rumor of troubles over the far hills. Geese rose over the lake and…
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Crawdads
About two hours after you put the crawdads in the bucket they start to smell. They can’t survive out of the creek. They need to crouch under a flat smooth rock in steady current. None of us had a plan beyond the plop in the bucket. It wasn’t holding them or even looking at them…