The next time I see Paris, I don't know how we'll be welcomed. With any luck though, we'll do better than that poor young woman looking for a sketchbook here in Boston.
Fifty years ago I put those two bars, three ribbons on
each one, in a box, never thinking I'd need them again.
I live in this hundred-and-thirty-year-old house, have for more than thirty years, and I guess that makes it a home, but it's certainly more than that.
Personal Essays
Memories are not the best primary sources, but I have tried to remember my own feelings about race and those of people I knew before, during, and immediately after WWII, and I should like to try to convey some of that to you.
Doris Kearns Goodwin said on TV roughly that most Americans were unaware of FDR's inability to walk, citing as her evidence that no pictures of him on crutches or in his wheelchair appeared in newsreels or newspapers. She was wrong.
Sixty years ago we walked a little more, but nobody could have imagined the kind of traffic snarls that exist today. When we wanted to go somewhere that was too far to walk, we "took the streetcar." Are we better off now?
An essay I just read mentioned the writer's habit of wearing T-shirts carrying messages that raise eyebrows wherever she goes. I have some T-shirts, too, but only one of mine is worth keeping--it has a picture of a palm tree and "It's better in the Bahamas!" on it. (Published in Seven Seas Magazine, May, 2004. This link takes you there; when you're finished, please use your back button to return here.)
Only a high school senior, but a major in the Reserve Officers Training Corps, I commanded the rifle range at the annual summer camp. (Published in flashquake, June, 2006. This link takes you there; when you're finished, please use your back button to return here.)
I wrote this back a few years, when I was a reporter for The Fort Worth Press (it's extinct now). In those days nobody had invented Creative Non-Fiction, but I did it anyhow. From an old clipping, this is not so easy to read. (Just close the page to return here.)
