“You wan’ dat hat, darlin’? It sure do look lubbly on you. Wanna see a glass?” I wrote, when the twentieth century still had three decades to run that when you hear those words, you’re in Nassau, you’re a tourist (they know) and you’re about to fall under the spell of a straw dolly. I was living the life of an expatriate writer, just ninety miles…

I had only met Sue, the colonel’s daughter, at noontime, but we spent every hour the rest of the day together, talking about everything under the sun. She was a large-framed girl, long-legged, lanky and coltish, with lustrous black hair in a French roll, a pert nose, kissable lips, and…

When you are male and young, there is something very disconcerting about the whisper of nylons moving between rounded feminine thighs in the silence of a nearly deserted library. The faintest whiff of an essentially musty perfume materializes out of the overall mustiness of the looming stacks of books, distracting you completely from the words on the page in front of you. The rustle of clothing on clothing traduces the determinedly scholarly atmosphere with subtle sensuality that is not…

“Where are your poems?” the sultry librarian asked me, with the firm assurance of her kind of woman that I would have poems. Woman with liquid dark eyes and long black hair and a kind of sad facial beauty unillumined by her wry smile. Mediterranean? Hebrew? I never knew. Her assumption about poems made me feel remiss because I did not have them. I considered poetry beyond my ability. This was on an old Army garrison post beside the Seine in Fontainebleau.

wikimedia commons images (Down to four tubs since I moved to this cottage older than me several years ago. Slow going.) Only six Rubbermaid tubs left to sort through full of a lifetime’s worth of words on paper. Less than half what I started with when I moved to this small apartment that passes for my personal archaeology dig. I was never a very careful filer. Date on a letter that came to the top of a pile today is December 27, 1965. They built stationery to last in those days, and ink as well…

In the muggy September afternoons, the Saint Louis city streets were alive with baseball fans in red shirts and red hats converging on Busch Stadium for the Cardinals’ final home stand of the season. The Cardinals weren’t in the pennant chase that year but still the faithful came, like a sluggish bright-red river when viewed from the height of my hotel room. I spent most of that afternoon on the phone with family members back east, fulfilling the behest of my dying mother in Washington State to prepare them for the end. She didn’t want to talk to any of them, not even her ex-husband, my father, for whom she still had…

The best I could say for Navy civil service was it paid the bills. The work was boring unless pilots in training made fatal mistakes. Then the base commander would ask me to handle media. His uniformed underlings didn’t know how to do anything but stonewall. Annapolis-trained, he knew better than that. And knew the closest big daily was my alma mater. The city editor who hired me out of high school rewarded his wisdom with unsensational coverage, rare in the anti-war days. The captain’s stock rose in Norfolk and my stock rose with the captain. Not with his subordinates; most Navy officers viewed civilian employees like plantation owners viewed house niggers…

WHAT HAPPENS TO time spent in the waiting rooms of your life? There must be some learned equation to explain cosmic forces that bend time spent waiting, like refractions through a dirty prism. Windows of this Germany train station are opaque with coal dust from old-fashioned steam locomotives. The loudspeaker…

Cheyenne, 10–10:45 pm MDT It had taken a tense scramble in Goodland to organize Dillon Rice’s “posse” for the run to Cheyenne. Buford needed authorization from his captain to change states. Warden had to alert her headquarters. Locals needed to be notified…