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America’s Wailing Wall
“Maya Lin, we need you once again, it seems. But, this time, you will not be memorializing some 58,000 lost souls, but, rather, in America alone, by the time of Biden’s inauguration, over…
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Cassandra of South Carolina
“In daylight, one person in the house—the straight, white male—regularly storms out to rage impotently at the squirrels. In the night, the insomniac (I) goes out to startle the raccoons on the largest…
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While I Breathe, I Hope?
“At the beginning of ‘the curriculum that will be COVID,’ I read whatever I could find regarding the influenza pandemic of 1918, an experience that has all but vanished from contemporary memory with…
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Letter from An Unnamed English Village
“A dear friend of mine, a Southern woman long expatriated to England, sent me the following letter, and I would like to share it, anonymously, with a larger readership . . . for…
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Ouzo of Dalmatia
“Because I paid for Ouzo, I claimed naming rights and, though he had no ‘papers,’ we knew he had a pedigree. Ouzo was a pure-bred dalmatian, with all the havoc such breeding (such…
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The Color Orange & My First Cousin Steadman
“Though Steadman and I—on those so very rare occasions when we meet—are more or less overcome, for the duration of our time together, and all but speechless, remembering our mutual losses, we also…
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Dear Vassili . . . (Best of Hubris)
“Throughout the land, Democrats and Independents alike await (like Godot) the reappearance of Special Counsel Robert Swan ‘Bob’ Mueller III, who, we pray (to no one in particular) will come forth, sooner rather…
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A Dog Named Ouzo
“Because I paid for Ouzo, I claimed naming rights and, though he had no ‘papers,’ we knew he had a pedigree. Ouzo was a pure-bred dalmatian, with all the havoc such breeding (such…
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The One-Legged Yogini
“Iyengar Yoga master-teacher, Kofi Busia, writes: ‘Health is not, and cannot be, an individual affair. It is a community—indeed, a cosmic—affair. Individuation is the root cause of all suffering. A community, even a…
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The Difficult Lesson of Subtraction
“The year of work was intense and solitary. Helen, on her coast, set me tasks; I, on the other coast, took them on. One involved visualizing the mindful subtraction—element by element—of parts of…