When ancient Elmer was young and dashing and on the prowl, he would wait for a phone call about love or anger from someone important to him at the time. Over the years more than a few w...

Midnight in San Francisco. Yoshiko is 93 and she can’t sleep so she sits in her recliner and nibbles on a rice cake,

For some nervous wrecks a pill or two might help. For others

I found an old friend in a cardboard box in the basement where I left him forty years ago.

You’re standing on a window ledge on the 50th floor of your building… It’s Valentine’s Day in Manhatta… clouds cruising, sun everywhere, a nice breeze tossing your hair,

The Sixties almost killed Will, a wasted man who sobered up long enough to vote for JFK. And he’d have voted for RFK if he hadn’t been killed as well.

If I owned a magazine I’d publish folks who agree with me as long as they remained abstract,

The last visitor before I sleep is always the old priest puffing up the stairs to my door, a wine cask under each arm, a loaf of pumpernickel in his teet…

On Saturday mornings several bowed citizens gather on the sidewalk outside the clinic to read the Bible and pray.

I never think about bison. After all, I live in St. Louis, why should I? But when I went hunting for quail in Montana

You never know who’ll be there though folks are dying to get in. Then suddenly you’re at the door, hat in hand,

We’re troubled by the very rich we see only on TV and worry about the poor who sleep at night in doorways and in parks, the trul… with little more than the clothes…

He should have married someone, James tells himself at 80 coughing in bed with the flu. He remembers very well that Miranda was a nice girl.

Thirty years later, Dad came back and we met for Ham and Yams at To… Pouring his tea, he told me he had to restore power once at a newspaper warehouse