The Dollar Tree store is heaven on earth, A strip mall version of a miracle birth. Candy and incense and napkins and jam, Put your wrinkled buck down, thank you much, ma'am! It's bang on…
Posts published in “Essays”
Whether I’d been naughty or nice and regardless whether I’d shouted or pouted, Santa Claus has always been good to me. “Always” only goes back to the 1950s, but it suggests I have some history…
Christmas is a dangerous time, for it threatens social instability, political disorder, even revolution. At the culmination of the story kings kneel before a helpless baby; the powerful pay tribute to the seemingly powerless. In…
“Just before light… darkness, impenetrable.” So Aunt Mae would say, always placing the adjective at the tail end. I stayed with Aunt Mae and Uncle Carl when my sister was sick in the head. I'd…
"Oh Lord, stuck in Lodi again," the famous John Fogarty lyrics. That's about all I knew about Lodi. I've been to the Skydiving Center in Lodi but it's maybe more Galt than Lodi. Anyway. But…
I have said it before and I will no doubt say it again: my fellow human beings either run to me or from me. No one is neutral. Case in point, I got into a…
On the cover of Marc Levy’s The Best of Medic in the Green Time is a photo of a Colonel in clean, starched fatigues with a bit of a paunch. He’s been choppered in for…