Long ago, the grandmother sits with the elders and smokes the medicine in the pipe. She is not even technically a grandmother, so much as a great- or great-great-grandmother, an almost mythic figure who, from the vantage of her granddaughter, blends in with the land itself. But in this memory, she is just a girl,… Continue reading The medicine
Case studies
Pontifications on Swedish beauty
Recently, my father and I took a two-week trip to Denmark and Sweden. Although the trip also involved a tour of the Elsinore castle, a cycling tour of the Swedish countryside, and a leisurely stay in Stockholm, I had an ulterior purpose: to investigate the stereotype that people of this region (but Sweden in particular)… Continue reading Pontifications on Swedish beauty
The rock
He comes to the mesa in his forties and the rock is still there. Long ago, fresh out of college, he and a golden girl had lain in the bare sun and made love on the rock, and it had felt as though a precipice greater than the mesa had been reached, possibilities spanning out… Continue reading The rock
The Buddha meets Hitler
The prospect of an entirely blank universe, an empty shell. Of course such a prospect is unimaginable to the human mind, but usually we substitute in its place four white walls, the equivalent of a film set’s green screen. Within this empty shell, sound would echo infinitely, and yet there is no sound. Does such… Continue reading The Buddha meets Hitler
Love at first sight in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”
I am currently teaching Romeo and Juliet to 9th graders, and recently we read and discussed act 1, scene 5, in which the eponymous characters meet for the first time. During this meeting, Romeo delivers the following speech, one so beautiful and pure as to bring a tear to my eye: O, she doth teach… Continue reading Love at first sight in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”
Jackson Holzberg Buckley 