That time I almost met Harper Lee.
I take great pride in the Lee last name. According to legend, and also my father who, among his many world travels, visited the "Lee place" in Ireland, etc. I think, from what I can gather, that it was hardly more than a couple of sticks stuck upright in a slab of mortar. I mean, that's been centuries back; the only palpable evidence was that of the family crest, but don't ask me what's on that thing. I couldn't tell you. What I do know is that there were only ever two Lee brothers who set out for the New World. Both...
He'd just always wanted a hearse, he said.
U.L. and I like to take Sunday drives, after dinner, each week. There's no rush to this ritual. We enjoy a long dinner with the rest of the family; we gossip, we share news (even the made-up News, an old habit we used to do when I was younger, that's found some way to stick, even to this day). What you do is, you mute the TV, you guess at what's being said by looking at the graphics, and then you tell your version. It was quite a shock, for instance, when I realized that Bush had actually been re-elected, and even greater still,...
Part Two: Aunt Lola
When and if I remember a dream it's because it has some potent element to it; I'd like to think I made that point, clearly enough, in yesterday's blog. And certainly, I would think so with the Billie Holiday dream; and those precious and upsetting few that have come true...all of which I've shared with you. But the potency, when it's there, is one that is, that must be, for me, necessarily Fascinating and Disturbing in its minutiae, as it invades my mind, my lobes, with its obsessive and small details; isn't that where God is, according to van der Rohe? I make no bones about...
I drank it as if it were holier than Coke.
Hold on, now. Don't think I'm crazy, entirely, but I have on three separate occasions dreamed things that have then occurred. In actual life. The first involved a childhood pet, Scruff, who had gone to live with my grandparents at Fish Camp, a family compound surrounded my cabins, ponds, a basic swimming pool, and a torturously long vegetable garden, where we gathered each summer for a fish fry and the annual task of grading blueberries and other such fruit; several on my father's side were in the fruit farm industry; after an afternoon of grading blueberries, there is no child on...
The philosophy of Frogism.
One time, when I was small child, a friend of mine and I beat frogs to death with red, plastic shovels after a rain storm, mid-afternoon on a Saturday. It was just one of those things that you do when you're a kid. I was never a particularly violent child. Though, perhaps I skirted the state line of crazy for a band of years during my adolescence, like, ages Birth to Present...but, believe me, it's in our blood. I've managed to escape, cleanly enough so far, and that's it's own definition of success. To this day, I pray for those frogs' souls, though. And, for good measure, I...


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