Love in vain
The marriage between my parents dissolved after 13 years. Love in vain? Love misunderstood? Love become intolerance? No doubt all [...]
Don’t speak
Whenever I make that fateful trip to my local Rome hospital to have my ruined eyes examined, my mostly steady [...]
The denial of death
Mortality and death were not acceptable topics of discussion in the household of my elementary-school years. Had Bosch or Bruegel [...]
The last storyteller
In the painful final days of his life, my father, usually the most private and discreet of men regarding his [...]
God, help me
In August 1988, my mother died in Washington, D.C. — her second home after Rome — and made a very [...]
Termination
This is a very short story about my two children. One is Jason, by now close to 45, and Nedra, [...]
Gently weeping
This is a love story that could easily slip through the cracks if you let it. I won’t and can’t, [...]
Orphaned ashes
Acquaintances of mine sold a longtime family property in a midsized rural city in the American South. The house, which [...]
“City of Miracles”
In Rome of a previous era, I once shared an apartment with a woman who said she acted on orders [...]
Mario Zoom
I called us the Zoomers. I was in my mid-twenties, a novice to Rome life. Behind the wheel of the [...]
A dollar gets a dime
Toward the end of his life, long after battles won and lost, brute temper and trivial anger exhausted, my father [...]
Deep blue sea
Smaller than small, I once set out on a a great adventure at the Washington aquarium, another way of saying [...]