Mr. Nobody
I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? —Emily Dickinson I Who Have Been So Many Men. He opens his eyes in the dark, and hearing nothing but silence, he cannot tell where he is, or the time,...
View ArticleOatmeal Raisin Cookies and the Jewish Problem
My friend from kindergarten, Richard Murway, still lived in Lakewood, Ohio, the Cleveland suburb of my childhood. A stranger in Cleveland, who had found photographs from the 1930s of his father in a...
View ArticleSeedtime III: Notebooks 1995–1998
1995 February The hardening palm, bone turning to stone; like boulders surfacing in a gentle valley. We become more like rock; the bone begins to manifest itself, to reveal its power and the way it...
View ArticleFrom Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–1994
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) won the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature. He spent the first two years of his forced exile in Zurich, Switzerland (1974–76), and then moved with his family to...
View ArticleScreen and Dream
Wednesday, February 5, a windy, rainy, chilly afternoon nearer the end of the world as we knew it than anyone seems to suspect. I’m sitting at a little marble table, in a draft from the unaccountably...
View ArticleFrom Just Go Down to the Road: A Memoir of Trouble and Travel
Report Card I By the time of my third year at King’s Park Secondary in Glasgow—school motto: Video meliora petoque, I see and aim for better things—I had proved myself to be better than any of my...
View ArticleLike Grant Took Richmond; Orange Order Fair, 1952
Like Grant Took Richmond By the time I got old enough to understand as much, I recognized that my grandmother’s genteel sayings had eclipsed the Germanic ones of her childhood. For example, Great...
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