Wednesday, January 30, 2008
This is my journal entry for today, my 40th birthday: (Explanations reserved for darker corners of my notes to self.) Today I followed through on something planned in childhood. I read Donald Justice’s poem “Men at Forty” to see how it resonates today compared to when I first found it over 25 years ago. MEN [...]
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
thunderstruck adj 1: as if struck dumb with astonishment and surprise; “a circle of policement stood dumbfounded by her denial of having seen the accident”; “the flabbergasted aldermen were speechless”; “was thunderstruck by the news of his promotion” [syn: dumbfounded, dumfounded, flabbergasted, stupefied, thunderstruck, dumbstruck, dumbstricken] My first memory of “thunderstruck” is from high school. [...]
I was seven years old in the summer of 1975. At a hotel in Bangkok, I was with my family among a herd of Americans ordered to evacuate Laos. Hundreds of Americans, mostly military, filled the lobbies and halls of the hotel (wish I could remember which one). Activities were organized to keep us young [...]
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Trying to erase from my memory the sounds of yesterday. Filling the stairwell of my apartment building, a woman cried “DON’T DIE ON ME I NEED YOU OH NO!” Catherine’s father died. Fire trucks and ambulances appeared outside my window. Noticing this I was alarmed to see a stream of firefighters and medics file in [...]
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
I got a job organizing confessions that were either non-coerced or not given under oath. I am unclear of the status of these confessions or of their value, but the job interested me enough to make an elaborate 2-trains-and-a-bus commute to the office. The subway train conductor announces the World Trade Center stop. I take [...]
For as often as I have wandered the grounds of Calvary and other New York City cemeteries I have, with the exception of groundskeepers and cemetery workers, never approached any live person. I go to these places (Calvary in particular) for the distractions of personal histories, not to meet and mingle. With some trepidation I [...]
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