Tag: donal

Salt and Pepper   White privilege it’s called and recently I learned its name although I’ve been white as a sheet for decades. Like breathing and eating I take  white privilege for granted.  I push a cart through a megastore in bib overalls and no one follows me and when I hail a cab in a snow storm, it picks me up. My freckles may be a stop sign.   Not so […]

A Puzzling Marriage   Married 60 years Fred and Daisy still are very different people.   All day long they hide their differences to make their marriage last but every night after supper they let them out silently.   Fred in his recliner works  a crossword puzzle while Daisy in the dining room works a jigsaw puzzle   but neither Fred nor Daisy  speaks a word until one has finished and howls […]

The Widow Next Door   Every Saturday  when the sun is out and it’s hotter than Hades   Monica next door  raises her garage door early in the morning    and leaves it up  long past noon as if  Herm will walk out   at any minute  oily and greasy needing to clean up     the way he used to  every Saturday […]

They’re usually poor people, sometimes considered the flotsam of society, always in the way at the grocery store, at the post office. They can’t find their money, if they have any. They’re never in a hurry. They have nowhere to go and you’re always in line behind them, a busy man with people to see, appointments to keep, deadlines to meet. You try to […]

Age Has Curtains An incident in youth never meant to happen recorded on a pad to be read  another time  is found  decades later in a drawer of socks by the writer  who is then on the precipice of age. His reading glasses help him understand who it was  and why he did it. Not so funny now. Can’t apologize. He’s […]