Prose

I am a dog. I make no bones about it. There’s nothing I can do about it. I came into this world a dog and that’s what I am going to stay. I’m a big dog. There’s nothing I can do about that either. Little dogs tend to snap and snarl and bark because they’re…

You know how it is when you clean out a filing cabinet or a drawer. You find what you knew you had all along and forgot. You give yourself credit for remembering. That’s what I found today, a piece of paper about an airplane. They called it the Pietenpol. Back in the 1930s you could…

I love old books. I have one in front of me now. It lies open on my desk. One of twenty volumes bound in watered silk entitled Author’s Digest, The World’s Great Stories In Brief, Prepared By A Staff Of Literary Experts, With The Assistance Of Many Living Novelists, printed in 1908 on thick vellum…

I’ve got a picture I want to show you. I want to show it to you this way. It’s a picture of my grandfather, my father’s father. A man born in 1898. My grandfather stands among eighteen other men in the picture and seven horses in the winter in front of a raw, unpainted frame…

You got no class. Sorry. You got no idea. Tough luck. You weren’t born soon enough. That’s the way it goes. Call me old enough to know better. Call me too old to get it up. Call me anything you like. I don’t have to call you anything at all. Because you got no style.…

I took a ride yesterday, the last good day to ride if you like temperatures in the seventies. A very windy day. I didn’t know how windy until I got out in the country. Then I knew. It blew me off my line, that invisible line you travel left of center near the opposing traffic…

In 1964 my mother bought a clock in the city where we lived. A clock to stand in the hall, purchased with money when her mother died she received. Not a lot of money. Enough to buy the clock when I had only just begun to enter high school. The clock ticked in the hall.…

I think it is important to go home a winner. I think it is important to allow no dream to die, else it is no dream worth dreaming. If a dream dies, it is mortal and no dream should be made of such rotten stuff. We live in a world of change, but what makes…

There’s something called the Zone. It’s a place runners talk about, mostly runners. They talk about entering the Zone when they’ve run a long way and their body wants to stop, but they keep on running and there’s a Wall, but they run through the Wall and they enter the Zone. It has something to…