Category: Uncategorized
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A Cautionary Tale
That Sunday Tizi had gone to a bridal shower. Before the snow started I dropped her off at her sister’s and drove out to Drayton Plains to visit my friend Chris and his wife Nancy. I brought along my guitar. Through the afternoon we played and sang Beatle songs. We played and sang Crosby Stills…
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Drink Up
Hey, that’s me in San Marino, with Tizi’s uncle Giuseppe, aka Zio Pino. It’s June 1978. I’m riding in his Mercedes. We’re going down to the Sacramora spring to fill water bottles. He’s loaded three cases of empty bottles into the trunk of the car. Tizi and I have been married six months. It’s my…
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How Many Fingers
My friend Brian Bennet turned to me in band class and said something in German. He was taking the one foreign language class offered at our high school. This was ninth grade. I asked him what he said. He seemed pleased with himself, repeating his German, then translating: “How many fingers has Anne?” “Huh,” I…
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Working Man
The first summer I worked on the construction crew, my foreman’s name was Fred. He was a big guy, a Ukrainian. Fred wore bib overalls and a billcap. He kept a pencil in one bib pocket, a pack of Kools in the other. In moments of stress he tweezed a cigarette out of the pack…
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Pilot Error
That’s me, standing up in my sailboat. It’s sixteen feet long. The deck is a buttery yellow, the hull white. Up front the jib flutters in the breeze, while the main sail is slack. Why am I standing up? What’s that power boat doing so close by? Inside my sailboat, lake water was knee-deep. My…
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To Harm an Ear
My father was invited to sing at his grandmother’s funeral. His Aunt Clarice insisted. Of the old aunts–Edna and Hattie, Fern and Pearl and Clarice–I think she was his favorite. He told the story more than once of how she had taught him how to skip when he was in kindergarten. A story I could…
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Who You Are
This is how professor Hoerneman explained diminishing marginal utility. “Let’s say you’re over at Berger’s, and you order a beer.” A joint near the college. Mentioning beer he immediately had our attention. “You pay for your beer and you enjoy it. In fact, you enjoy it so much, you order another one. The second beer…
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Please Stand By
We had one television set. It was black and white. There was no remote. You had to get up and turn a knob to raise and lower the volume, get up and turn a different knob to change the channel, of which there were four: channel 5 (CBS), 6 (ABC), 12 (NBC), and 56 (UHF).…
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Sorry, Mickey
We were also a danger to ourselves. It was a school day afternoon, a winter day. Dan Leman and I were tubing on Cantwell’s hill. If you took a running start and flung yourself on top of the tube, if the snow was flat and iced over, you could almost reach the river, crossing the…
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Two Gentlemen
The car is parked at the edge of our service station drive, next to the restaurant. It’s a light blue 1968 Chevolet Impala, a convertible. The top is down. The car belongs to Jim Ingram, an itinerant welder. He’s all of six feet tall, thin and rangy, in his 30’s. He wears jeans and a…
A Legacy Project 