Her favorite daydream puts her on the beach at sunset, her body slowly releasing the heat of a long afternoon. “This is how a clay pot must feel,” she tells herself. “When it is just released from the kiln.” And then she laughs, in her dream, an airy, lilting laugh that drifts slowly away across the incoming waves. Seagulls twist and arc in an impossibly blue sky, their aerial acrobatics set to some ballet music just outside the range of human hearing. They shorten into specks, then disappear, far out to sea, before materializing again in another segment of the horizon.
There is a dog, of course, for what is a daydream about the beach without some mongrel in need of grooming, dashing into the surf to rescue a broken stick? …
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I sold a book the other day. I’ve sold literally, no exaggeration, millions of books in 45 years as a bookseller, but this was a unique event; this time it was a book I had written.
I was in Green Apple Books, the one on Clement Street, the original. My wife, Judy, and I trade books with them all the time, which is one of the advantages of living in the Richmond District of San Francisco; the bookshop once voted the World’s Best is also our neighborhood bookseller. Back in December when my book first came out, Kevin, one of the partners, and a friend I’ve known and sporadically worked with over the decades, had been kind enough to take some copies of my book on consignment and display them in the store.…
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I find myself
stepping on ants
just because I can—
something I haven’t done
since I was seven.
There is a “For Sale” sign
in the manicured lawn
belonging to the maroon house
on 347 Maroon Court.
There are moving boxes
stacked neatly in the garage,
strangers trampling down the white carpet
with their shoes still on,
strawberries growing in garden beds
that will ripen in time
for fresh lips,
and lights being flicked
on and off
by the hands of those
who have no idea
that the hallway light
only turns on
when the garbage disposal is off.…
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I can’t keep saying what everyone wants to hear, that I have bad days but basically everything’s okay. Things are not okay. I pretend I care only to avoid the fallout of admitting what I actually think and feel. If I said how I truly feel I’d be an outcast or end up having to endlessly justify why I’m so insensitive. My wariness of being found out runs so deep I can’t imagine life without it. All the precautions, the second-guessing, just so I can open my mouth and say, How are you doing today? and give the appearance of someone who gives a shit. I probably did at one time, way back. Where that part of me went I don’t know. Needing to keep up appearances has flattened any honest sentiment. …
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‘I would love to be able to be in the bathroom alone’ I remember musing
when she was small and always in my arms and on my hip that first July in the yellow house.
Those days went by so fast and while my lens was wide open and all I have now are blurred
images
of seedless green grapes cut in small pieces on a tray,
a blue kiddie pool with cold water left out on a summer morning to warm in the sun under a
cotton clothesline as I held her and hung laundry with wooden clips, while baby frogs on the side
of the garage hopped under a leaky brass garden hose spigot into moss below
and onto the meandering slate path
that kept fleeting prints
of their small
wet feet
that evaporated
into mist.…
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We were so bored in high school in 1978 that we very nearly threw a kid in the bonfire at Homecoming. We had nothing in particular against him; he was just tall and gangly like the rest of us but unlike the rest of us, he hung out with girls: homely girls, girls from our neighborhood, ones we called dogs. This made him an easy target. I didn’t like pursuing him, didn’t like calling him pussy and sissy and such but it couldn’t be helped, I thought, because I certainly didn’t want the rest of the pack chasing after me.
The rest of the pack: a gang of virginal boys dreaming of becoming otherwise, dreaming of dates with magnificent girls who would quietly disrobe and ruin us.…
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I
At the end of my year’s commitment as an anti-poverty worker, I couldn’t decide what to do next, so I re-upped.
In the southern Appalachians, where I served, levels of education were low and substandard housing high. Textile mills, subsistence farming, and minimum-wage support industries constituted the job base. Most of the individuals joining Volunteers in Service to America had finished college, and those without degrees had gone to college for two or three years. The majority came from the Northeast, Midwest, or West Coast. Whereas the locals ate white bread, grits, and sweet iced tea, the VISTAs ate bagels, hash browns, and hot herbal tea. They all drank Pabst Blue Ribbon. Most folks we encountered believed in the inferiority of Black people and the biblical version of creation.…
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