Widow in a rocker pets her calico cat long strokes slowly. With the cat purring and the widow humming

When I was eight I jumped off a roof as if I had a parachute and broke a leg. He was there when I landed,

On a clear day in the day room he will tell anyone he has had an askew life. When he was a small boy out for a Sunday walk

An hour before dawn the paper is out on the lawn white in the moonlight a trumpet dozing after a long night in a jazz bar

The police have announced the arrest of an ecumenical fellow who in less than two weeks in the middle of the night set fir… to seven churches in St. Louis.

Yours is the first email I opened… I appreciate your suggested revisi… to send the work back once I’ve ma… I can tell you spent a lot of time… I’m afraid, however, that I can’t…

I have a friend, old and retired, who keeps busy helping the poor. Let’s call him Ted because he wants to remain anonymous. Some of his ideas, he says, wouldn’t make many of his neighbo...

He wants to be fair to both sides because there’s an election coming soon so he tells his side every day

When you were a boy in 1948 living on a block of bungalows in Chicago right after WWII you had a red wagon you pulled behind your mother

There are good souls who say poverty need not always be with us who say there’s a way to make it disappear

Been in trouble all my life childhood through old age. I took the alleys

Some emails are more difficult to receive from a child long out of college

There are a lot of people like me neither rich nor poor, idling in the middle who have never wante… for anything in our lives. We were reared by parents

Young Tim goes to Zaire to write his dissertation in African Studies. While there he meets and marries a beautiful librarian

I never remember year to year but then some morning in March I’ll walk out in the yard