This weekend, my wife and I will drop our son off for his freshman year of college.  I am anticipating an emotional parting; after all, it was me, not his mother, who used to get up at six in the morning when he was five to take him to hockey, or vice versa.  I...
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MAYNARD, Mass.  It’s Thursday night at the Sitting Duck Pub, a biker bar in this Massachusetts town of 10,000.  A reporter asks Darlene Rivers, a thirty-something woman in a tube top, whether anyone is sitting on the empty bar stool next to her.  “Not right now,” she says after blowing cigarette smoke out of...
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       “Are there really, truly zombies in Haiti?”           “Bien sur,” Delzor said.  He had even seen them: affectless men and women with a deathlike pallor, high nasal voices, and the characteristic drooping at the chin.           Into the Zombie Underworld, Mischa Berlinski, Men’s Journal   It was getting late, and my eyes were...
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We walk, each with ear phones in place, as if through so many self-contained concert halls; the crowd of commuters who disembark from the train, the hordes of travelers moving through an airport terminal. South Station, Boston Each person listens to his or her own private sound track, and everyone gets where they’re going.  If the...
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Rocco Landesman, new chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, says he will open up funding to rap artists.                                                               The Wall Street Journal I was sitting at my desk, tapping out rejection letters to the poets, community theatre groups and local symphony orchestras whose pending applications sat on my desk like stacks...
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An alternative sentencing program in Massachusetts allows felons to choose between going to jail or joining a book club.                                                    The New York Times Book Review             Tiny and me-excuse me-Tiny and I-had been circling the block on Oakridge Road for probably half an hour, casing the joint where our book club was...
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CHILLICOTHE, Missouri.  Lamar Gene Lange is a retired telephone lineman with a gut that hangs over his “International Harvester” belt-buckle, evidence of his fondness for red meat, beer and fried foods.  “I figure life’s too short to deny yourself simple pleasures,” like the steak tip platter with Texas fries he is tucking into at...
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LOS ANGELES, California. Rodney Gage spends his day hunched over a photocopy machine at a 200-person law firm in Century City. “You wouldn’t believe the crap I have to put up with,” he says as he staples an 80-page bond indenture together. “‘I told you to do it two-sided,’ or ‘I wanted it on...
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At first, I had no idea I was in hell.  I was lying in the same street I walk every day at noontime on my way to lunch. “What happened?” I asked the man who helped me up. “You stepped off the curb without looking over your shoulder.” It’s a tricky intersection, especially for...
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I’ve been a fan of hagiography–the lives of the saints–since first grade when Claude Dunham and I were asked to represent St. Stephen and St. Sebastian, two martyrs of the early church, in a tableau vivant of bored boys.  Not content to stand in silence while Sister Mary Agnesita recited the manner of our deaths, we...
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