My back pages

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Current Affairs, My back pages, Politics, Religion

They lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow…

September 11, 2010

When I tuned into NY1 for the 9/11 ceremonies to hear the reading of the names they’d only made it to F; when I went back later they’d reached the R’s. I’d missed hearing the name of the only person I knew who perished that day. Rebecca Kaborie was a college classmate from Ohio, a…

Current Affairs, My back pages, Travel, Writing

Home Fires

July 17, 2010

I’m a memoirist; in my mind’s eye the past is a series of boxes filled with people, events and places that time recasts over and over. Depending on shifts of perspective and mood, the land of what-used-to-be can emerge in ways that can baffle, annoy or overwhelm. In Cincinnati, the city of my birth, my…

My back pages, Sketches

The End of the Year

January 28, 2010

So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell, blue skies from pain. Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell? Roger Waters, Wish You Were Here By the time we made it to Washington Square Park, 1993 was already half a…

Deep Songs, My back pages

The Super with the Toy Face

September 30, 2009

Note: an earlier version of this piece was published in the literary journal Ganymede Fall 2008 and on the website Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. They called him the neighborhood watchdog. He was the ancient, antic super of 515 Edgecombe Avenue, an immense, pre-war slab of yellowed bricks and mortar at the corner of 158th Street. His complexion, shaded always…

My back pages, Sketches

Two Boys

May 10, 2008

Once I believed, a long time ago, that he and I were different. Others thought so too, as I’d discover over the years. Even after his death, friends and acquaintances might recall something he said, a peculiar mannerism that made me cringe, or an act of kindness or derision—their reminders forced recognition of how dissimilar we were….

Current Affairs, My back pages, Sketches

The Quality of Tears

February 10, 2008

At first glance I mistook her for a child. She was tiny, but it was also the way she dressed, in a short dark pleated shirt and denim jacket that made me think Catholic schoolgirl. And it was the size of the man she clung to; he was large and boyish with a drop of light brown…

My back pages, Sketches

Boy Meets Boy

January 20, 2008

“Hi—you’re Eee-nis, right? Baritone, breathless: without warning, the voice over his right shoulder brushed his ear in a sigh of panic, as if the speaker had been chased by dogs. He hadn’t heard footsteps, or the usual whoosh from the door separating the auditorium’s main stairwell from this tiny chamber that housed the theater department’s bulletin…

My back pages, Sketches

Marks of Memory

March 6, 2007

When my father died, he bequeathed neither money nor property. He did, however, leave a motto: “You have to shave everyday.” As a child I watched him tackle this most manly of tasks, a bespectacled black Santa with a face swathed in aerosol foam. No sign of awkwardness or fear informed his razor’s slow, sinuous…

My back pages, Sketches

When He Knew

January 15, 2007

Perhaps he might have noticed the headache first. With the onset of HIV it would have been atypical, a persistent buzzing immune to aspirin, ibuprofen or acetaminophen. Rolling from the base of his skull to the crest of his furrowed brow, it would have been a sensation freighted with the heaviness of an eternal cloudy day. Dan might…

My back pages, Sketches

The Boss

January 5, 2007

Ted Davidson’s desk was perched on a platform in the middle of Save Discount’s headquarters, so regardless of where you were in the store, his head and shoulders were always visible, like a judge poised to rain down wrath. Hell sitting on top of heaven, one of the female cashiers mumbled, though everyone knew why he’d…