One day, at a very early age, I reached the conclusion that I would live forever. I remember saying to myself on that occasion, in all simple certainty, I cannot die. It was a revelation, not a plea, one which arose not from long deliberation or fear, but from the earth itself, and seemed to emanate from the palm of my upheld hand. This startling new truth was borne out […]
After my hospital adventure, I wasn’t able to go back to school right away. But the time finally came when I was deemed strong enough to return to the classroom. The first day, instead of catching the morning bus to school, my mother took me in the early afternoon, after lunch and recess. It was story time. If I remember correctly, the teacher read to us, but we might also […]
When I was six, shortly before Halloween, our family doctor, who lived down the road from us and around the corner, stopped by our house and told my parents in his usual blunt way, “Well, your boy has leukemia.” He’d made this grim determination upon viewing the results of blood tests I’d been given after a strange rash had broken out on my arms. I spent the next ten days […]
When I was in fifth grade, I learned to play the trumpet. It was easy. Each week, when the music teacher asked me to play the current lesson, I went through the lines without error. I didn’t practice. One or two times through at the beginning of the week was all I needed. When I was in sixth grade, it was the same. Finally, the time came for me and […]
Saint that I am, I also shot a bullfrog. But I don’t remember if it was before or after I shot the sparrow. When I shot the sparrow, I was alone. When I shot the bullfrog, I was with the boy who lived down the road on the farm adjacent to ours. We both shot the bullfrog. I remember being sickened by it at the time. I knew it was […]
More than fifty years later, I still think about the sparrow I shot and killed when I was a boy, and how, in one brutal, life-changing instant, it fell from our walnut tree and landed on the ground. Even now, I remember its tightly shut eyes and colorful feathers, which from a distance had seemed drab and gray, and the little grave I dug and placed it in. Thank goodness […]
Concord — harmony; a grape; a town; Emerson; Thoreau; all that’s forgotten, but not unknown. * Negativity: the great pandemic. Yet the cure is instantaneous, and starts with yourself. * How strange, being a member of a species smart enough to kill itself. And here is our mother, gently whispering over us, Live, and we think her voice is only the sound of the waves, the wind in the trees. […]
As my fingertips on one hand traced the lines of the open palm of the other, I suddenly recognized them both as old childhood friends. It felt like years since I’d seen them. I held them up. They looked at each other, then at me. There were many things I could have asked them, but they seemed so sensitive and shy, I only nodded and kept silent, thinking, Perhaps another […]
This old body is going through some changes this winter. It reminds me of cracking walnuts with my father during the long cold evenings. He was a boy, and I was at least a hundred and ten, when, crack! The outside was in, and the inside was out again. . [ 1640 ]
I sweep the rug in the entry with the whisk broom our family used during my childhood. Every once in a while, bristles come out — museum pieces — like these, from my memory. . [ 1637 ]
William Michaelian 