Dr. Michaels usually remembered to take off his white coat before he went into Allison’s room, and today was not an exception. He put it on one of the nicer hangers and made sure the name tag on his breast pocket was clearly visible when the closet door was opened.
Philadelphia, 1962. “Dirty beatnik,” he muttered under his breath. Maurice Povich sat with his roommate on the balcony outside his dorm at the University of Pennsylvania. It was the night before graduation, and Al decided to light up a joint. … Read More
Before the war, I often perched on the fence of the cow pasture to watch the trains go by. That was well before I was unable to stand the sound of trains. I had nothing else to do besides throwing rocks in the muddled Risle and memorizing geometry and morality lessons until everything mingled irremediably in my head. My only friend was Adam, though sometimes his cousin Anne, who was a year younger than we were—but just as sharp if not more—would tag along with us when we went down by the outskirts of town to smoke cigarettes and kick a ball back and forth.
“Well, look here. Your grandma started out with a neurologist at Sound Shore. An older gentleman by now, recommended, respected, you know what I’m saying to you. She gets dizzy sometimes. Dad tells you when she goes to the hospital.”
Until the February of his eleventh year, Joseph Cohen felt an inordinate kind of sympathy for all earthly things he encountered, even—and in some moods, especially—for inanimate objects.
Before, she had felt as though of the night as a separate space—a sealed pocket of her life—but now she was reminded that everything that existed around the pool at daytime still stood by at night: the black hardtop of the basketball court, a racquetball wall, and the town Rec Center itself, a building which tomorrow would reveal to be little more than a grey dome without windows.
