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BALLAD OF BERME ROAD

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BRICK COLLECTING: An Odd Hobby

[This article appeared on a website called "Brick Collector", whose creators had obtained it I know not how. Actually they had no doubt...

WHITE GUILT PART 2: Apologizing to the Pequot

To Nicholas Peck, who in his laconic and inscrutable manner first suggested I embark on this particular undertaking, and to the memory of...

WHITE GUILT PART 1: What's in a Name?

A Personal Quest Through Family History [Originally written in 1997, here with recent edits] On a warm April day in 1986, my father and...

Once and Future Eden: a Brief History of Croton Point

[This article was published in the magazine “The Westchester Historian", Spring 2001] The first time I came to the “Clearwater Revival”...

1974 Me Predicts 2024 Me

[I wrote this when given the High School English assignment of imagining myself in 50 years. It was published in “Literary Cavalcade” of...

Hothouse Child

Noun. Hothouse flower. A person who is very fragile and vulnerable as a result of having been sheltered. Journal entry, May 15, 1976. Age...

How to Live in a Lifeboat

Or, Diogenes Meets Jack Kerouac Meets the Swiss Family Robinson “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring...

The Ballad of Berme Road

The very first time I ever saw the house on Berme Road, the tenants made sure that I was shown a rattlesnake. It's probable that they...

Running Away From Home

[This is a combination of actual journal entries, and explanatory passages written seven years later, edited somewhat. Names have been...

Unfinished Dissertation on Virtue and Vice

Goody Underhill's Catechism, or Considering a Basic Template for a Moral Life I was going to call this "The Seven Deadly Virtues". Turns...

Revenge of the Needle Fairy

Dec. 5, 2016 Hold Me Tight and Fear Not, or The Revenge of the Needle Fairy “For they may turn me in your arms To a fearsome dragon snake...

Letter to Mama

Dear Mom- I wanted to thank you for being such a fierce, loving Mama Lion to me all of my life. For showing me how to be strong; how to...

On Being an Autodidact: Memoirs of an Effete Impudent Snob

Pearl Bowser, my friend Jora's mother, who lived on Joralemon Street in Brooklyn, had a bulletin board in her kitchen completely filled...

Valkyrie

Back when I was in my teens and crewing on large piratical looking sailboats, I was given a nickname by the figurehead carver. He called...

Saving the Mystic Traveler

My phone rang and it was Dave, my former partner and Dad of all my kids who happens to be fighting cancer right now, going down to Sloan...

Cleaning Out the Truck

On Beginnings and Endings 1/19/19 It's a raw, gray late January day, with a knifelike east wind blowing and a big snow storm on the way....

Rose and Briar

THINGS IN THE HOUSE: 1 The Soldier and the Girl and the Briar Rose 1/20/2019 Two wooden cookie presses, each about the size of a deck of...

Crossing the River Now

Watching Mom and her partner Ann breathing, often synchronously, as they lie together on the bed under the light blue comforter, Ann...

Listen as Often

" Listen as often to things as to beings..." This is a paraphrase of the refrain to a wonderfully eerie Sweet Honey in the Rock song...

The Deathbed Reading List

In Defense of Winnie the Pooh 4/17/19 I’m contemplating reading aloud from beloved children’s books to my dying mother, who is lying...

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