Dating with Dave
Really Dave’s idea of great date involved our basement and pizza delivery. No formalities, no suffering through new waitresses or the fry cook learning his trade. None of the unease involved when two people with…
Category: Essays
The Year in Holidays
Not half so important as we’ve made them now, the holidays of my growing up were still bookmarks, distinct cross-sections in our daily lives. All Schools Day and the May Fete Begun in 1914, All…
Reckless
It wasn’t exactly my idea, that trip to Dulles Airport on a rainy fall evening. Merilee invited it. Supplied the schedule. Wanted Ben to find a friend in Washington—some collegial ally– while she wrestled with…
Guinea Pig
What parents encourage their sheltered 20-year-old Kansas daughter to leave home, fly to Washington D. C., and become a human guinea pig? Paul and Esther Sherfy, that’s who. Among other frightfully respectable, thoughtful Church of…
Gettysburg
On Saturday, June 24, 1967, one of a car full of National Institutes of Health college-student guinea pigs, I visited Gettysburg National Military Park for the first time. I can’t remember what my friends…
Turn On All the Lights
Say all the cheerful words you know about winter solstice And the sun’s certain return to world, There still aren’t enough lights in the house To temper this dense hostile land of January. Dark and…
Jazz: Call and Response
We could, for that hour, talk one 17-year-old to another. Our voices, the patterns of our speech, the images in our head caught in the amber of youth. Burnished, deepened, sweetened by fifty years of…
Bulletin Boards
Who hung the four-by-five-foot, white-against- white framed bulletin board on the east wall of our bedroom? Part of my modest 4-H home improvement project; Mother’s wise choice even before that? I can’t remember. But by…
Here
Dying here, in this place to which I’m grafted, doesn’t seem so hard. Breathing easy, beyond struggle, down the road past fear. I settle in beside Dave’s ashes on the bluff above the North Fork,…
On What We Build Our Lives
I will myself back to the top of our basement stairs at 830 North Ash—our “new” basement—goose-bump chilly, a little skittish at the edge of darkness and rising dank. Hungry nonetheless for the lives that…