Earlier this week my good friend Sally confirmed what I had feared for months: Our mutual friend of more than half a century, Anne, had died. I had such dread of the news, which I felt was almost inevitable, that I had held back from finding out that my fears were grounded. I stayed off of Facebook. I avoided writing Anne, and getting no response, and I put off calling Sally. In fact, when I finally did speak with her,…
This story is written as a stand-alone short story, but it may eventually wind up in the Growing Up New Jersey collection, a series of vignettes slouching their way into becoming a book. See more vignettes in this collection at the Short Stories &c. link above. We were getting around Kentucky, the Blue Grass State, that particular June. Coming from New Jersey, I had never been to Kentucky before. But my girlfriend back then, who we’ll call Anne mainly because…
This story is in the Growing Up New Jersey collection, a series of vignettes slouching their way into becoming a book. See more vignettes in this collection at the Short Stories &c. link above. My neighborhood growing up was a little like a solar system, the neighbors’ houses being the planets revolving around our house. Except the planets didn’t move and were fixed in the neighborhood firmament. Other than that, though, it was kind of like a solar system, if…
This story is in the Growing Up New Jersey collection, a series of vignettes slouching their way into becoming a book. See more vignettes in this collection at the Short Stories &c. link above. Give a kid a tape recorder, you know, one of those devices that took little plastic reels of magnetic tape and had a microphone you held in your hand, and it was just an invitation to head down the rabbit hole. I had one of those…
This story is in the Growing Up New Jersey collection, a series of vignettes slouching their way into becoming a book. See more vignettes in this collection at the Short Stories &c. link above. Some months just stand out. October 1957 is one of those months. That was the month the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth. On October 4, 1957, to be exact. If you were around in October 1957, you’d know that Americans…