Childish notes — some things never change. And some things, are not things, at all. Summer in the vineyard, a small boy sitting under a vine, hidden by all the other vines. Thinking of it still, of the stillness, still that still, nigh sixty-eight years old, in full. One breath in all — one moment, one grand revelation, one sensation, of being. Alive, blue jeans to the ground, the same […]
I collect sentences as I collected sticks and feathers when I was a boy, and then I forget them when night-time comes. How much of pain can be attributed to its original cause, and how much to the fear it will grow worse, and maybe not end? If I’m still alive at suppertime, I think I’ll set the table with the yellow dishes my parents often used when I was […]
War is never there, it’s always here. There’s no such thing as murder in the third person. Like you, I tried. Very hard. Too hard. Now I don’t try at all. But you need not believe any of it. You’re free to think that you and I are trying now. Corn on the cob is something we have only when it’s ripe locally in the fall. I usually slice it […]
It’s indicative of character, I think, that beyond my immediate family, my dearest, closest friends are people I’m unlikely ever to meet in the flesh, and who live hundreds or thousands of miles away. It’s also indicative of the times, for without social media, email, and online publishing, chances are great that our paths would never have crossed. As it is, the number is still small. I have many acquaintances, […]
Must I learn the hard way? A valid question, perhaps — if there is a choice, and if it comes to that. But the gentle road is oft-mistaken — like an autumn breeze, or an old gray cat that’s lost its teeth, and can’t fight back. Am I on it now? Is there worse to come? I no longer ask. I carry on. I remember the night Cisco died. I […]
Standing between the hot, vibrating fender and the seat, there was just room enough for me to ride beside my father on the tractor. At three miles an hour, we went up and down the vineyard rows, transported by the mellow, acoustic hum of the gas engine as dozens of blackbirds crowded behind us to hunt for worms and bugs in the newly turned soil. This, too, was paradise. There […]
The telephone was big enough and heavy enough that it could have been used to bludgeon an intruder. We had no intruders. We locked our doors only at night, or when we were away, by pressing the little button in the center of the knob; during the day, my father left the key in the pickup parked in the graveled driveway in front of the house. The telephone was in […]
Looking back, if I think of each insect and bird, each leaf and handful of soil, each mountaintop and white puffy cloud as an ancient scroll waiting to be read, then my daily childhood surroundings on the farm might be seen as a kind of living, breathing Library of Alexandria. And I had it all at my disposal without a single bit of advertising — no pop-up ads, unless they […]
I saw the lizard exactly one-quarter of a mile north of the center of the road in front of our house, resting on the dry ground within inches of the rusted peg my father had pounded in before I was born to mark the place where our farm ended and the two neighbors’ began — one with a vineyard to the west, the other with plums to the east. I’d […]
One day — a childhood day, a day quite possibly a year long or more — I discovered that our old blue boat was gone, and another boat, a simple, plain one made of aluminum, had taken its place. This new boat, I soon learned, was much easier for my father to pick up and slide on and off the padded runners he’d made for our pickup. He didn’t have […]
William Michaelian 