I felt tugging

“Head down, I did my best to avoid Xi’an, China’s searing sun and the men selling socks on blankets over pavement. They were partly protected by the thin branches of small trees but still exposed to the heat. As I strode ahead, my mind bounced backwards two or three decades. I was wandering in a busy shopping area off the beaten tourist track in France. I remember it as near Les Halles, but not Les Halles; at the time, I didn’t know precisely where I was. An Algerian busser, one of my coworkers, had sent me to buy my uniform—a white shirt with black plants and bowtie. This was in Paris—or I should say on the outskirts of Paris. Les Banlieues, or not les banlieues? The shopping square was wide and packed tight with brown and pale Arabs. There were Tunisians, Moroccans, Algerians, and others. They were thin and poor, yes, but doing better than they would be back home. It was crowded—we were moving within inches of each other, even rubbing shoulders, as we walked up the wide boulevard. No cars but too many pedestrians. 

“I felt something behind me. I felt tugging . . .”

~~ from “Chinese Sun” by Alex Kudera

Maybe because they're different

“A good  while before I ever owned an automobile—perhaps at 23 or 19—my father took me to look at aged Jeeps—now disposed of and on sale at the post office. They were pale and dirty. Four-speed manual transmission. They sold for five hundred bucks and were missing a side door or window. Dad thought that would be a bargain and a car I could drive. It didn’t seem appealing to me at the time, but then decades later during a morning at the barbershop, a woman with the mail appeared. Her vehicle was parked right out front. As she left and drove away, one of the barbers said, ‘I’d like to own one of those one day.’

“‘Why?’ 

“‘I don’t know. Maybe because they’re different.’”

~~ from “Chinese Sun” by Alex Kudera

Happy Thanksgiving

May your Thanksgiving be filled with dinner and peace.

"Chinese Sun"

My most recent publication, "Chinese Sun," begins on page 139 of Meniscus, Volume 12, Issue 2; the journal is the creation of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP). I'm quite proud of this piece, so I hope you give it a go.

Fathers that wear rags

Fathers that wear rags

  Do make their children blind,

But fathers that bear bags

  Shall see their children kind.

Fortune, that arrant whore,

  Ne'er turns the key to the poor.

~~ from Shakespeare's King Lear, Act II, Scene IV

late fall gold

 

Eugene N.

 

Michael Weingrad's Eugene Nadelman arrived from Philly.

out of luck

"'[W]hen a man gets a streak of luck,—n---- luck—he don't get tired. The luck gives in first. Luck,' continued the gambler, reflectively, 'is a mighty queer thing. All you know about it for certain is that it's bound to change. And it's finding out when it's going to change that makes you. We've had a streak of bad luck since we left Poker Flat—you come along, and slap you get into it, too. If you can hold your cards right along you're all right.'"

~~ from "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" by Bret Harte

luck

"He is just as nice and pleasant as ever, but he still does not know enough to come in out of the rain. He is the stupidest man in the universe. Until now, nobody knew it but Scoresby and myself. He has been followed, day by day, year by year, by a strange luck. He has been a shining soldier in all our wars for years. He has filled his whole military life with mistakes. Every one of them brought him another honorary title. Look at his chest, flooded with British and foreign medals. Well, sir, every one of them is the record of some great stupidity or other. They are proof that the best thing that can happen to a man is to be born lucky. I say again, as I did at the dinner, Scoresby's a complete fool."

~~ from "Luck" by Mark Twain

Gary Amdahl

Portrait of Gary Amdahl's Visigoth: Stories and I Am Death: Two Novellas.

 

the most pleasant part of life

"Kyoto I thoroughly enjoyed, staying in a Japanese inn, old-style, sleeping on a straw mat and lying on the floors half the day, admiring the little moss garden. Being on the floor was childhood again, and childhood is still the most pleasant part of life. A confession of adult failure."

~~ from Saul Bellow to Frances Gendlin, May 1972

A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty

"A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security."

~~ from Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard

his symptoms

GUILDENSTERN: We got his symptoms, didn't we?

ROSENCRANTZ: Half of what he said meant something else, and the other half didn't mean anything at all.

GUILDENSTERN: Thwarted ambition—a sense of grievance, that's my diagnosis.

~~ from Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard