Passing through darkened Virginia, lips eager and sticky from Southern Comfort, a girl and I talked intently in the vestibule. She was married, her husband was off in the army.

It is true that on bright days we are happy. This is true because the sun on the eyelids effects a chemical change in the body. The sun also diminishes the pupils to pinpricks, letting the light in less.

The bus seemed more crowded than it was, because half the passengers were smashed into the forward quarter. I stood with five other people on the steps by the front door; and whenever the bus swerved I held onto a metal post, the doors swung open, and my back hung out over the street.

I saw Margarito Duarte, after twenty-two years, on one of the narrow secret streets in Trastevere, and at first I had trouble recognizing him because he spoke halting Spanish and had the appearance of an old Roman.

I tell this story not for my own honor, for there is little of that here, and not as a warning, for a man of my calling learns quickly that all warnings are in vain.

In 1951 you couldn’t get us to talk politics. Ball players then would just as soon talk bed wetting as talk politics. Tweener Jordan brought up the H-bomb one seventh inning, sitting there tarring

We pick here because death is life’s ornament, because the place is masculine without the compromising presence of a male. It is a fortress, really, and in it we play as children, infected, set subtly adrift in our Father’s body.

Down at the asylum, the best-behaved patients were out walking around loose, roaming the grounds in their bathrobes and pajamas or sitting on benches staring at the road.

I ran into my old friend Curtis yesterday, way uptown — the edges of Harlem. We’d been in a drug detox program together many years ago, long before they became fashionable and assumed the look of Ivy League campuses.

It was Friday, the day of the big theriomorphism workshop Rotary luncheon out at the Holiday Inn. My wife, Meredith, and I and a crowd of red-faced Rotarians and their well-dressed wives