Fifty years ago Jane got on a plane and flew away without saying good-bye. Her parents took her, I know.

He’s always believed people of every faith can live in peace together in America no matter what happens

It’s Ramadan and late one evening I walk by a mosque and hear little girls laughing on the sidewalk,

For years leprechauns lived under Pop’s fedora. They danced jigs on his head when he wore it and hid in his ears

She speaks the truth as she always has in 40 years of marriage especially when she’s lost in making dinner

Mae mailed Christmas cards today, fewer again this year because death has made her address book a skeleton. She has a son in Russia

It’s a very busy drug store with seats along the wall where folks who wait for refills sit and sometimes chat but as I discover you can

You can learn a lot, both true and false, in a dingy all-night diner where old men gather at a table in back

A homeless man hangs himself from a tree at night in the city to close out the year. At dawn a passerby uses

We’re going dancing, my wife and… to a Charity Ball high in the sky… Glenn Miller’s band has been play… since 1944, the year his plane got… over the English Channel.

Jesus, can we talk? Some folks say you’re coming back any day now but many of them have been saying that for years. They say it could happen tomorrow, or maybe next week, and they’ve al...

A student asks the old poet why he has spent so many years writing. The old poet says no one’s asked him that before. He needs a minute to answer.

I should have said yes, meet you anywhere you want for lunch, even that greasy spoon with the lousy chili and corn dogs… Every five years or so we meet

I lived in the attic back then, and late those evenings I had to s… and couldn’t afford to go drinking I’d run down to the deli and buy bagels and smoked lox.

The Nazis call her Hilda, this ancient woman who makes a simple living in a bathroom in Berlin giving high colonics