Death by cancer is: being pushed to the lunch table in a wheel chair when cancer-riddled bones won’t support you; measuring your days in teaspoons of morphine, carefully counted; carrying a rubber cushion to pad the pelvis from which all flesh has melted.
Three absent friends Read More »
Once we talked to friends of their children, their houses, their careers, their plans and dreams; of the books they were writing, films they had seen, art they had created, gardens they had grown. Now we talk to friends of their illnesses, their operations, their diseases, their pills and potions and prognoses, of who has
Cabbages and kings Read More »
We need a Richter scale for major personal events that rattle our core, shake our life, leave fissures in our psyche. Sometimes we can put books back on our mental shelves, replace broken windows, rebuild fallen walls. But sometimes the mind is left all out of joint forever.
I think I played the cards I was dealt as well as I could, but at times it was tempting to go for misere
Ambition burned white hot when I was young, then I lost it, discouraged, then found it again, then lost it, then found it, now, in old age, thinking myself safe, the old fraud seems to have appeared again.
In old age anecdotes from the past come flooding into my brain, elbowing each other aside, each one eager for attention
Some of my friends die young, all of my enemies live to a well-rewarded, ripe old age, it seems.
How can Irememberperfectly thewords of aLonnie Donegansong from1958when I haveforgotten so much?
