Stories

Two weeks below 0 F, wind bites deep into the fingers, bones are like icicles, and nature shows a malevolent face. Machines keep us alive.

Nothing has been more thrilling than to see IU football win a perfect 16-0 season… until a hit left its star quarterback lying face down on the grass…

What is meaning but a droplet

of the ordinary in which

we glimpse something

true and beautiful, slight but real?

He was a very old man … in his late 70s… absorbed in one of the simplest tasks on earth … his movement had a dignity that I do not remember seeing in the city with its more important tasks.

Below us was a crowd, men in business suits pressed together… the desire in those eyes and hands, each one searching for the feel, the touch, the connection with the force we call truth, as if through the shake of a hand, that which Sam Ervin had done could run into their bodies and erase their sins…

Was she a hundred now.… One hundred?… How could that be…  in the bathroom, with her glasses still on… her eyes cleared… a face flashed in the mirror, this shriveled head of some strange old lady… is that me?

I was standing on the white deck around the blue pool, shielding my eyes from the sun… Her face was too close, staring at me through her black sunglasses, my bare feet burning on the cement deck. Behind me, a distracting set of two parallel walls encircled us and the pool area like a corral…