NonFiction – Year VI – Number 49 – June 2021

The ice surface at the Mount Vernon Sports Complex—my home rink—was down for repairs that springtime Saturday evening in 1984. That meant I’d have to go to the Fairfax Ice Arena instead. If it...

            'We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element.'...

Saving Souls We watched the door. All fifty of us in St. Sylvester School Grade 3 learned to listen and to watch for our teacher, a tall nun dressed in flowing white robes with a...

“Children begin by loving their parents; then they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”         --Oscar Wilde My once tall, athletic, commanding father hunched over a walker, his prosthetic leg clumping along awkwardly. My three small dogs...

THE TORCH FOR PEACE by Deborah Kent I met Lydia in my college dorm back in 1966, and I knew right away we had nothing in common. Where she was brazen I was cautious; where I...

My uncle raises chickens for eggs. To facilitate egg production, he bought a rooster. The brood runs around in the grass in the back of his house, which was my grandmother’s before it became...

You’ll Always Be the Trump Neighbors I’ve seen you walking your dogs around the neighborhood. Almost every day for the last 17 years, ever since we built this house in a far-south suburb of our...

Blessed Are the Free in Spirit. A Journal in Complicated Times by Samuel Robert Piccoli Here we go again, a new book is born. A few weeks ago, when all the chapters were already written, I...