When Homer stubs his toe or bumps his elbow, the pain is always piercing but Homer’s a pious man so swearing isn’t for him.

So this Mick on the next stool, who’s as serious as Yeats but looks like Wilde, stares at me, with eyes crossed,

Where I live the press says teen use of heroin is epidemic. I thought an epidemic was a widespread disease afflicting thousands caught in

In a life with many valleys and a few mountaintops Alvin has met many people he thought were normal and others he thought not.

He’s at least 70 now and has never forgotten his childhood. He lives with that child every day… He remembers that Thanksgiving Da… his family had parched field corn

I don’t know why my wife and I are up at four in the morning sitting in recliners drinking coff… staring at half-hour commercials claiming to cure everything

She’s not young, his wife. They’ve been together 40 years but when she gardens in her shorts and he’s lying in his hammock she’… a lovely sight to see so when she

A drunk on the subway tells another drunk something a bartender told him. He says if the rich guy wins, it will be the first time

As the snow swirls around them, an old man in a wheelchair uses sign language to tell another old man standing at the bus stop, “Friend,

The hands on the atomic clock upstairs finally stopped spinning. As you know, my dear, the hands have been spinning for two weeks. This morning the clock stopped

The problem with Chloe is she moved to San Diego where the weather’s fair but hasn’t found anyone who’ll listen to her so she

Planned Parenthood surgeons deplored the murder of Cecil the Lion. They wonder how a

Harley turned 70 the other day and died riding his motorcycle through a pink dawn,

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...

Not a leaf left on the crabapple t… instead little red apples hang like ornaments on a Christmas tree… Little red apples that spend most of the winter covered with sn…