The Christian
Coffee and doughnuts. I remember the vast sanctuary with its naked wooden pews — maroon cushions, hard backs — lined on either side with stained glass windows — red, green, and yellow — and the vast cross taking up the wall behind the podium. Rock wall, scraggly rock. How you’d have to come out the door and go down a flight of stairs and along a wide, cold, marble-floored hallway to the men’s room through a door that seemed much too small, and how it was even colder in there, smelled like cotton candy from the puck-shaped pink deodorizers at...
Read MoreBottom Dwelling
I walk around the city with my bible under my arm: the newest, glossiest edition of the local rag, rating the city’s best cheap eats. That’s when it hits me — I might as well be called Shrimp. Small, curled up, and festering upon itself, that’s the shrimp. I had walked past Lazzo’s, #3 on the list, so many times in the scramble of the alphabetland blocks downtown, the helter of mismatched storefronts I found so hard to take seriously. It didn’t even resemble a pizza place, with its blue-and-white hand-lettered sign, so un-Italian in my sensory lexicon. I was on my way to take a...
Read MoreErase
See, you can’t just erase the information. There’s no such thing anymore. When you put her name into that search engine and hit ENTER, it got stored in (on?) the computer by all these — I don’t know — these little robots or something, and they filed it away with their segmented metal hands into secret compartments that you’ll never find. It’s like the machine is designed to work against you, to pit you against yourself, so that you can’t trust yourself anymore. And now the truth is out there, and you have to pray that it doesn’t find its way back to...
Read More1984
The day the new online catalogs arrived in the library marked the beginning of the end of Mrs. Lilah Lamb’s 25-year-library career. Or perhaps it was the day Mr. Chesterton, the new director, stepped into the library a year and some months earlier, in January 1984, a year for technological bodings. Mr. Chesterton was leading the Irving Public Library into the electronic age with the library board’s blessing. He even tried to make the transition to automation as painless as possible. To let patrons and staff get used to electronic browsing gradually,...
Read MoreQuestionable Behavior
Dear Addie, I must confess, my husband Bill and I are not regular readers of your column, but we hope you won’t hold it against us. A good friend of ours said that if anyone can help us, it’s you, so here goes: Our eleven-year-old son Toby will not stop asking questions. From the moment he opens his eyes in the morning ’til he reluctantly closes them at night, it never ends. And I mean that literally. Just today, when I woke him for school, the first words out of his mouth were, “Mom, where is sleep?” “What do you mean, honey?” I asked him. “When you go to sleep, where do you...
Read MoreFrogman
When I was little and little was in my bones, something I could feel and know, something simple and miraculous as stars or fresh dirt, I would stand in the shallows of the San Lorenzo Creek in Santa Cruz and watch the water glide by. It smelled eerie and loud as if long-ago Indians were at the bottom making a ruckus, and the water smelled like shouting. I just knew Indians had something to do with water, the dark cool of it and the smell of it. I wanted as a kid to breathe the water, except I knew I would drown if I did. I sort of wanted to drown, too, though. It might be worth it just to...
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