Category: Yo Ivanhoe

  • 'She' = 'He.' And 'Her' = 'Him' And 'His.' Just Because It's Easier That Way

    He took her somewhere. She went willingly. They went together. It wasn’t exactly as if she were lost, although that description would work for the sake of melodrama or metaphor. She didn’t, though, have any melodrama left in her, and she no longer had any use at all for metaphor. Things exactly as they were…

  • What I Have Learned, What I Am Trying To Learn

    to be a discoverer you hold close whatever you find, and after a while you decide what it is. Then, secure in where you have been, you turn to the open sea and let go. —William Stafford, from “Security” What you cannot hang onto you must let go of –that is the principle on which…

  • Monday

    Saturday afternoon I was approached outside my house by a down-on-his-luck character who told me he was trying to buy a used car over on Pillsbury Avenue and had found himself fifty bucks short. He’d taken the bus from St. Paul to look at this car, he explained. He’d just gotten a job in Maplewood…

  • In Other Words

    The giving of thanks: lip service is easy, but really feeling it, truly giving it away, expressing it from your heart, that’s more difficult. Where do you even start? Any fool with a roof over his head, a car to drive, a job that pays the bills, food in his cupboard and refrigerator, a sense…

  • Don't Get Him Started

    Show me a man who can’t trust, he used to say, and I’ll show you an untrustworthy man. It was lies that broke his spirit and drove him out of the arms of…what? America? The human community? The lies of culture and commerce, public and private lies, political lies –virulent dishonesty propagated by sociopaths, a…

  • Not An Avenger, Not A Thief

    Time is a sputtering lantern, a bruised child, a gray, flat-faced man with fists of concrete and legs like pistons. He has it in for dogs, which is one of his many cruel and inexplicable character traits. Misunderstood and misrepresented throughout history, gussied up and dumbed down, the snaggle-toothed bastard is frequently outfitted with wings…