One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what nothing means, and keep on playing. Why, BZ would say. Why not, I say.
Memory fades, memory adjusts , memory conforms to what we think we remember.
Let me tell you what it is like out here tonight. Stories travel at night on the desert. Someone gets in his pickup and drives a couple of hundred miles for a beer, and he carries news of what is happ...
Janis Joplin is singing with Big Brother in the Panhandle and almost everybody is high and it is a pretty nice Sunday afternoon.
It seemed that the marriage had reached the traditional truce, the point at which so many resign themselves to cutting both their losses and their hopes.In some ways it was the conventional clandestin...
It is three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon and 105° and the air so thick with smog that the dusty palm trees loom up with a sudden and rather attractive mystery.
In was raised to believe that what came in on the next roll would always be better than what went out on the last. I no longer believe that, but I am telling you how it was.
In fact I no longer value this kind of memento.I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.There was a period, a long period, dating from my childhood until...
In both England and the United States, he observed, the contemporary trend was to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully...
If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a...
I suppose everything had changed and nothing had.
I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.
I promised myself that I would maintain momentum.Maintain momentum was the imperative that echoed all the way downtown.In fact I had no idea what would happen if I lost it.In fact I had no idea what i...
I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emot...
I find many mass cards from the funerals of people whose faces I no longer remember. In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I a...
I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents. Those who do tend to cite the markers that indicate (their own) status in the world: the Stanford degree....Those of us less incline...
Huey Newton laid down his life for us, Stokely Carmichael had said the same night. But of course Huey Newton had not yet laid down his life at all, was just here in the Alameda County Jail waiting to...
How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything obse...
Her choices, all.Sentimental choices, things she remembered.I remembered them too.
Hawaii is our Gibraltar, and almost our Channel Coast. Planes, their eyes sharpened by the year-round clearness of blue Pacific days, can keep easy watch over an immense sea-circle, of which Hawaii is...