I have too many shoes. But that was not always the case. As a child reared in a poor family in an Appalachian region of Kentucky, I don’t ever remember having shoes. Growing up, I looked through my Mother’s few family photos, and noticed that I was not wearing shoes in any of them....

So, Where Are You From? I don’t like to sit next to anyone on airplanes, and I especially don’t like to chat while I am airborne. It’s partly fear of flying, perhaps a touch of xenophobia, and mostly just craving the solitude I rarely get at home. All I really want, after I stash my carry-on, is to slap on a headset, savor my reading, or get into a deep meditative state. Then comes the beseeching words from the passenger beside me, “So, where are you from?”...

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Gobby. That’s what we called the thick foamy goo engorging the brook near the quarry.  Gobby, like in that kids’ song about gray green gobs.  And enticing, of course.  As if a rain cloud had semi-solidified, plunged to the earth, and insinuated itself down the brook.  We plodded around in it, scooped it up, stirred it with a stick and marveled at its odd consistency....

I’m alone in the passenger seat of a parked car when I see a huge black serpent with a cobra-like head hovering above my side window. Horrified, I stare at its cold green eyes, vacant and unblinking. I’m wondering whether I should just hold very still or fish around for the keys to start the car and pull away. Then I notice the door on the back passenger side of the car is wide open.

I guess it’s true that if all the people who claimed to have been at Woodstock were really there, no one would have had the space to groove to the music, let alone lie down and fornicate at Max Yasker’s Farm that summer of 1969. What tweaks me even more these post-millennium days, though, is a refrigerator magnet that proclaims: If you remember the 60’s, you weren’t there….

The great bicycle heist was one of those stellar Tommy Davis exploits gone awry. Ella Jenkins was stunned to see her cousin Tommy dragging Wally Perkins’ almost -like-new bicycle around behind the Freewill Baptist Church where she lived. Of course, she knew that Tommy owed that Wally Perkins a good one for his prattling and tattling, but she never expected this. “C’mon, Ellie

They emerged from the jungle like a vision from Brigadoon painted by Gauguin: two youthful women in colorful sarongs, barefoot and bearing mounds of roots and leafy herbs in baskets balanced across their shoulders at each end of sturdy poles. Despite the mud and driving monsoon they were as graceful and serene as we farangs (westerners) were rumpled and discomfited....

“And don’t sing the answer,” chided my eight year old daughter, compounding the rejoinder required by her simple inquiry.  I had to laugh, because I knew that my habit of responding to my child in song or rhyme was my own mother poking her head through my New York City persona...