Not So Fast, My Dear

By Peggy Phillips

If you read the popular press, it seems many people dread turning fifty, feeling as if the hourglass has now been flipped and their life is certainly half over. Against all common belief and expectation, however, fifty turned out to be one of my best years ever. Not only did I go way beyond my comfort zone, stretching my mind and body, by hiking the full fifty-mile circuit of the High Sierra Camps in Yosemite National Park, ascending from about 6000’ to 11,000’, but I also met Norton.

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On Not Getting Down To Write

By Pat Gallagher

I think this morning, after I check the headlines and start the laundry, I’ll get going on a couple of pieces of writing I have in mind.  Exploratory things.  One, an account of my year in Walthamstow, East London over 40 years ago; a year of robust immigration to the UK of British Subjects from India and Pakistan. I was living in Manor Park, E. 12, and teaching reading in a primary school in E. 17. The idea for this piece was sparked by a news story I’d recently read about the arrest of several putative airplane bomb plotters from Walthamstow . I think I’ll see if I have anything to say about that so I begin:

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Virtual Robert Levin

By Carl Kopman

We sat in my car parked by the beach at Todd’s Point smoking a joint; this was Mendocino after all. I had brought Robert the book of photographs we’d produced after he’d moved into the nursing home. He was pleased with the quality of the photographs.

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IF

By Pat Gallagher

We are sitting in the living room, the late afternoon sun making its way toward the horizon, casting a warm glow on the walls. My son and I have been chatting, catching up on family news. He is about to leave when we are startled by what sounds like an escalating argument on the street below.

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The Holdup

By Robert Yoder

“What children of a marriage rarely witness is the nature of the love that brought the whole thing – themselves included – into being in the first place.”
– William Trevor, May 1993, New Yorker Magazine

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The Wild West Of My Dreams

By David Schweidel

El Paso, Texas is a brown town, the brown of mountains, the brown of desert, the brown of skin and earth and muddy river.  When I arrived in El Paso as a five-year-old in the summer of 1959, I wanted to see that river, the famous Rio Grande.  I’d seen it in movies, glorious cowboy movies with majestic vistas and mighty, rushing rivers, silver water sparkling in the sun.  I wanted to see the river and the mountains and the horses and the cowboys.  I wanted to see the Wild West of my dreams.

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