“ESTRAGON: I can’t go on like this. VLADIMIR: That’s what you think.” ~Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot In 1987, I was assigned to Laura Temple’s Freshman English class. Mrs. Temple loved Kate Chopin as much as she hated the smell of watermelon chewing gum. Sarcasm was her love language and I adored her talent […]
I blink my eyes open and peer at my watch. 2:17 pm. I yawn and swing my legs onto the floor, then bend at the waist to stretch my back. Back in the Before, this was the time of day when I wrote. But that was Before. Most days, I trade writing for napping. Because […]
“Every man, women, or child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness.” ~Cicero Dionysius, the fifth-century ruler of the Italian city of Syracuse, was a paranoid and miserable tyrant. His cruel, iron-fisted rule gave rise […]
When the world began, it was dark and cold. Bear kept running into trees, bruising his nose. He called the animals together. “My grandfather told me tales of a giant ball of fire that sleeps way up in the sky. Who will go bring us that warm light?” The animals all averted their eyes, for […]
Two and a half billion years ago, earth was inhabited by some single-cell organisms, but little oxygen. Then, somewhere around 2.4 billion years ago, some small organisms learned to take energy from the sun and utilize it to create sugar out of water and carbon dioxide. This process – now called photosynthesis – pumped an […]
