Most everyone has dreams, some good and some not so much. Every time we drop off to sleep, our hard-worked brains get the chance to screw with us, and who can blame them for exploiting it? The nightmares vary from one person to the next: I’ve known people who routinely dream of being chased by homicidal lunatics, being paralyzed, or reliving childhood trauma, while my wife tells me she has disturbing dreams of driving
Several years ago, before Amazon made book collecting possible with the touch of a computer key, I did it the old-fashioned way. This is a story about cowboys and Indians and a skirmish that took place at the Sand Creek Library Book Sale. I lost. It all started when a flyer tacked up on a bulletin board in the library caught my eye. It read:
Dorsey Templeton was a math teacher at my community college. He’d served in the 101st Airborne during the Korean War, gone to college under the GI Bill, and was an All State football player, on both sides of the ball. His heritage was Osage and Cherokee, and he never stopped teaching wherever he could about Native American history. He was a big man who bore himself in the military style.
Midnight on a hot July night. My husband and I, sound asleep, woke up in a flash as 50 pounds of panicked Labrador jumped on my chest. Our dog, Sparky, had straddled me, of course! Mom! The one who feeds him, walks him and saves him from scary things. “Sparky! What . . ? “I didn’t finish the sentence. The odor overtook me, assaulting my eyes,
When I was in my twenties and living in New York City, I decided to impress my new boyfriend by serving Julia Child’s classic dish boeuf bourguignon in my apartment, which sat on the third floor of a dingy tenement walkup with a tiny and outdated kitchen. Some relevant facts: I was not a very experienced cook; my kitchen had very little counter space; the recipe has many, many ingredients
I remembered Drew from the 1960s, stoned on hashish or LSD, babbling Marx or Marcuse, whanging away on a red guitar. We lost contact during the ’70s, even though I’d occasionally see him, dressed in bright rags, riding up and down Tejon Street on a bike, a faraway look in his eyes. Early one morning while walking uptown to the park, I dropped into a place called Poor Richard’s for
