"I know someday you'll have a beautiful life. I know you'll be a star," I sing through clenched teeth, angry and bitterly alone again in the front seat of my car. Eddie Vetter screams along: "in somebody else's sky, but why? Why? WHY? can't it be... can't it be mine?"

At times like these-- occasions that seem to get less and less occasional, ( Read more... )

"You love her, don't you?"

"With all my heart," he says sincerely. "That's why I want her to have a better man."

What he means, it comes out, is a man who makes more money. The problem is really that she makes more than he, a lot more, and he doesn't contribute much on top of that.

It's in our nature as men to be providers: for every good man ( Read more... )

People change. Oh, I know there are folks who believe that people don't, can't, and won't. And perhaps it is true that there are some things about ourselves, some aspects of our natures, that do not and possibly even cannot change.

Perhaps those parts of ourselves that may or may not be, that without even a nod to how much has happened, how much we ( Read more... )

In my short life so far, I've learned a lot of things. Facts. Mechanics. But in the end they don't amount to much-- handy tidbits, conversation pieces. I've learned very little yet that amounts to wisdom.

Years ago, in high school, I made a decision. I felt that I wanted to teach, but a career with computers opened up to me, and it seemed a faster ( Read more... )

A boy lies in a night-darkened bedroom, high up on a bed made for two, far away from the left side of the matress, a side he's never used, idly and almost unconsciously watching the backs of his eyelids, a screen upon which a projector of unwanted imagination shows him. His bruised but unyielding ego tumbles down a washboard of might-have-been's ( Read more... )

For a couple of years, after Nathaniel was born and before Spencer got me the job at CBS, I was chronically short of money, living not from paycheque to paycheque but from crisis to crisis. There was never enough money to come out ahead, and the slightest extra expense or shortness of pay was enough to put the rent in doubt.

I was working at ( Read more... )

Sometimes we believe we feel older than we really are, though of course at twenty we have no way to know what it is to feel thirty, likewise thirty-five at twenty-five. Looking back on it, it seems like a vanity of youth, pretending to ourselves that our souls are old, and learn nothing from it.

Sometimes a good book can teach us wise turns of ( Read more... )

You signed all of your letters, "Yours forever."