Those without color—say, dressed in all black—can go about almost unnoticed. Where the rainbow is conspicuous, their darkness acts as a kind of camouflage, masculine by contrast, and allows them to watch without being watched. It’s the choice o...
He was a fixture of the New Paltz community, an inexplicable light switch in the new apartment that definitely turns something on but you can't quite say what. You flick it whenever you get home and inexplicably feel a sort of relief, promising yours...
When I was suddenly thrust into what everyone calls menopause (Orchids) earlier than my body planned, I decided someone needed to take charge on so many levels. It was time to not only change the vernacular, but to speak up and say "Hey! This isn't a...
You don't know me, dude," he says, not smiling this time. Gonzo examines his cards, prepping for his next move. "People always think that they know other people, but they don't. Not really. I mean, maybe they know things about them, like they won't e...
In battle, in a war, a soldier sees only a tiny fragment of what is available to be seen. The soldier is not a photographic machine. He is not a camera. He registers, so to speak, only those few items that he is predisposed to register and not a sing...
You know, I really think that when God puts together families, he sticks his finger into the white pages and selects a group of people at random and then says to them all, 'Hey! You're going to spend the next seventy years together, even though you h...
I realized I was going to get through this disappointing service, and anyway, you have to be somewhere: better here, where I have heard truth spoken so often, than, say, at the DMV, or home alone, orbiting my own mind. And it's good to be out where o...
Katy was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian's trap is kept shut, not by an act...
Here was what I wanted to happen when I walked through the door after my first real date and my first ever kiss. I wanted my mom to say, “Dear God, Meg, you’re glowing. Sit and tell me about this boy. He let you borrow his jacket? That’s so ado...
They avoided one another's faces, for fear of what they might see mirrored there. Each man thought: one of the others is bound to say something soon, some protest, and then I'll murmur agreement, not actually anything, I'm not stupid as that, but def...
He did not himself believe in the supernatural, but the thing happened, and he proposed to tell it as simply as possible. It was stupid of him to say that it shook his faith in mundane affairs, for it was just as mundane as anything else. Indeed the ...
The Limberlost is life. Here it is a carefully kept park. You motor, sail and golf, all so secure and fine. But what I like is the excitement of choosing a path carefully, in the fear that the quagmire may reach out and suck me down; I even enjoy see...
What if — is more complicated than that? What if maybe opposite is true as well? Because, if bad can sometimes come from good actions—? where does it ever say, anywhere, that only bad can come from bad actions? Maybe sometimes — the wrong way i...
Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, th...
In the cool dark basement, she whispers, "It's not Ralph, is it?" Cabel's quiet for a moment, as if he's thinking, "You mean like Forever Ralph? Uh, no." "You've read Forever?" Janie is incredulous. "There wasn't much else to chose from on the hospit...
For in grief nothing "stays put." One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often -- will it b...
People who chase money without chasing any good reason for it are always brought down by the money they chase. Yes! If God gives you a gift, he adds it's manual that contains how to use it to it. However, if you chase something without receiving any ...
Now I am their sword. And I do not forgive. I do not forget. So let him lead me onto his shuttle. Let him think he owns me. Let him welcome into his house, so I might burn it down. But then his daughter takes my hand, and I feel all the lies fall hea...
If one sets aside time for a business appointment, a trip to the hairdresser, a social engagement or a shopping expedition, that time is accepted as inviolable. But if one says: I cannot come because that is my hour to be alone, one is considered rud...
I start thinking about what happened and then I start thinking about why I'm still here. It's pointless. They say on TV that the soldiers want to be there? I can't speak for every soldier, but I think if people went around and made a list of names of...
Even if you hadn't entirely deposed (and possibly killed) not one but governments and destabilized all sorts of political regions you couldn't even pronounce, let alone draft up constitutional monarchies for, even if you'd been far more careful about...
