Sussex nights in early July do not stay dark for long, and by four o'clock gray creeps up on you from under bushes and from behind walls and soon you can easily make out shapes and features again. Half an hour later, it's as good as day.We had stayed up talking right on through the night against a shared, and much enjoyed backdrop of Joni Mitchell, Stealers Wheel, Ralph McTell, and even some George Frideric Handel, sustained by deeply held and shared beliefs. It was timeless talk. ...

The day before his execution, I saw my dad for the next to last time.I had never seen him this thin, nor this unshaven. In fact, I can't for the life of me ever remember him unshaven. Yet, here in his cell, with only a day to go—less than a day, now, more like twenty hours (not even that) till the blessed event, as he liked to call it—the gray stubble was probably a week old.It had been a while. For months, now, he had refused all visitors, and not even the Warden, apparent...

They say Jesus Kristus was untouched.You learn it in school, you hear it from parents, from grandparents—from them especially—from friends, and from preachers. You read it in the Bible: Jesus Kristus was the first to, and the only one ever to, escape, ascend, transcend, what have you, the Storm. He was the first ever to rise above it unscathed, as they like to put it on the late-night TV preacher-shows, especially now with a new Storm approaching, although unscathed means the same ...

Before the beginning of time there was no such thing as surprise.By the way, by the "beginning of time," I mean the beginning of this time, the one that we're now busy living and dying and doing things in, the one we're currently complaining about. There may well have been other times, you understand—there quite likely were, in fact—with their own beginnings and endings and complaints, but our time, the one going on right now and the one we are concerned with here, knows nothing of...

There is a visual suggestion. Not much more than an unexpected movement of the air, a fluttering in the corner of his eye.Perhaps not even that—it was more like a barky whisper as he strode past the old tree on his left, a gentle tap on his shoulder that didn't register for a few more steps: words, it said, words carved here in this bark.At that he stopped and turned. He looked back, then up; took the tree in. An oak it was, old and grand and mum, as if denying having said ...

The new blade, one of a sharp twin pair, slices skin and lets blood out. There's hardly even a sting at first, before the foamy shaving cream turns pink, then red, and here's the sting, for real now, as if let loose by blood. Foam redder still. It's a pretty deep cut."Damn."His right hand passes the razor to his left then dives into a blue box of paper napkins by the basin and brings one—two actually, they tend to cling together—out. He presses them against his skin. Holds ...

He sleeps in a small grass hut. Its floor is smooth ground, is hard dry mud trod and trod again by feet coming, going, coming, going, and sometimes staying.The hut contains nothing but empty space and a yellow and green mat of woven grass, still fresh and with a scent of field, serving as his bed. This mat is light and easy to roll up and stow away or to carry. Although it is thin he sleeps well on it and he does not wake sore.This morning was no exception: when he woke he ...

There are as many Gods in this universe as there are beings. And the game we play is called "Touch." It's a form of spiritual hugging. Easy to begin, pretty much impossible to bring to a close.How it came about: Before the beginning of the universe, before there even was a universe, we all held hands—well, figuratively speaking. We touched, I guess would describe it (hence the name of the game), and touching we synchronized, and synchronized we decided (on three, everyone: 1-2-3) t...

After much haggling and some give and take (the give mainly—actually, I'd go so far as to say exclusively—provided by God), He finally relented: "All right, all right," He said (twice—so four "all rights" in toto), all right (a fifth) we could leave if we wanted, if we really wanted. He sighed as he said this.This is how:Breathe out.For a full comfortable and thoughtless (as in no thoughts at all, not even a micro-one) sixty seconds do not breath in.Then do....

His grandfather was a cabinet maker. The rarely smiling old man who now had trouble walking and whose fingers struck the young boy as gnarled, helpless roots of some moving-about-the-house-with-difficulty tree.The grumpy old man who had trouble chewing most of his food for lack of teeth and who now and then drooled soup on his shirt at table and then pretended that he had not, even after mother would hand him a napkin, not even a thank you.This old man's name was Ljunge. It...

Spring was hard. The hardest. For this late in his life spring brought so many earlier springs to also touch him—a rush of them, each with a voice clearer than the next. Each singing faintly of promise, of rebirth, and not so faintly of fragrant and sunny mornings just above freezing but warming, warming, warming as the sun climbed well above the farmer's barn, huge and dark up there on the hill to the east.And in her tow, as she spread herself upon the northern earth: melting snow...

I attempted suicide in 1965. I wasn't very good at it.For one, while I have since learned that the lethal dose of regular 75 mg aspirins lies on the far side of 500 tablets, I attempted my lethal feat with 121 of the little darlings (yes, I kept a tally).For two, I did lose my nerve late that fatal afternoon, and alerted my dad to my Bayeresque overindulgence.This is not to say that this was not an interesting exercise, it was. I was sincere in my banging on that da...