City Of Pines Quotes

You're pining," said Jace. Alec shrugged. "Look who's talking. 'oh I love her. Oh, she's my sister. Oh why, why, why—

I get the feeling you'd rather pine over someone you can never possibly be with than try being with someone you can.

But, as much as I wanted to feel nothing about our undefinable relationship's early demise, I continued to feel a pang of inconvenient regret and longing. I hated longing. I hated it almost as much as I hated pining. It sapped the mind of good judgement, filled the heart with achiness, and distracted the vagina from other potential conquests.

They pine for the hip, frosty girlfriend they abandoned for a pleasant if unexciting marriage to her sunnier, less mentally present sister coast.

We lay side by side on the extension roof, hands behind our heads, elbows just touching. My head was still spinning a little, not unpleasantly, from the dancing and the wine. The breeze was warm across my face, and even through the city lights I could see constellations: the Big Dipper, Orion's Belt. The pine tree at the bottom of the garden rustled like the sea, ceaselessly. For a moment I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars and nocturne, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be all right.

To this boy of New England the May morning was like faint music in the woods again, some unspeakably exciting foregathering of events far in the deep shade of morning pines, all of it stirring there. He could hear it all faintly in the woods from far away, from across the fields and pastures, in the cool misty morning air, and he wanted to go there too.

I am back in my beloved city. The scene of desolation fills my eyes with tears. At every step my distress and agitation increases. I cannot recognize houses or landmarks I once knew well. Of the former inhabitants, there is no trace. Everywhere there is a terrible emptiness. All at once I find myself in the quarter where I once resided. I recall the life I used to live: meeting friends in the evening, reciting poetry, making love, spending sleepless nights pining for beautiful women and writing verses on their long tresses which held me captive. That was life! What is there left of it? Nothing.

I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees. The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets. It has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful. Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and benumbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy. ~Hamlin Garland, McClure's, February 1899

Just as there are broken people, there are broken places on this earth. Some have always been broken. All cities have such neighborhoods at their edges, and this city is all edges … block after block of bleakly hopeless outskirts. People don’t bury dead cities. They abandon them. They abandon them to the poorest of the poor, to the lost and the doomed.

I hated longing. I hated it almost as much as I hated pining. It sapped the mind of good judgment, filled the heart with achiness, and distracted the vagina from other potential conquests.

If you, like me, are essentially a city person, then the chances are that when you imagine a wood you picture a simple thing: matching green trees in even rows, a soft carpet of dead leaves or pine needles, orderly as a child’s drawing. Possibly those earnestly efficient man-made woods are in fact like that; I wouldn’t know.

The drive rose sharply to the left of the steps to a circle of flat ground where her maroon Buick was parked under an umbrella pine. It looked preposterous, stretched out on its white-walled tyres against the terraced vines and olive groves behind it, but to Eleanor her car was like a consulate in a strange city, and she moved towards it with the urgency of a robbed tourist.

Across the river there was a low red and gold grove of sassafras with hills of dark blue trees behind it and an occasional pine jutting over the skyline. Behind, in the distance, the city rose like a cluster of warts on the side of the mountain. The birds revolved downward and dropped lightly in the top of the highest pine and sat hunch-shouldered as if they were supporting the sky.

And now at last authentic word I bring, Witnessed by every dead and living thing; Good tidings of great joy for you, for all: There is no God; no Fiend with names divine Made us and tortures us; if we must pine, It is to satiate no Being's gall. It was the dark delusion of a dream, That living Person conscious and supreme, Whom we must curse for cursing us with life; Whom we must curse because the life he gave Could not be buried in the quiet grave, Could not be killed by poison or the knife. This little life is all we must endure, The grave's most holy peace is ever sure, We fall asleep and never wake again; Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh, Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh In earth, air, water, plants, and other men. We finish thus; and all our wretched race Shall finish with its cycle, and give place To other beings with their own time-doom: Infinite aeons ere our kind began; Infinite aeons after the last man Has joined the mammoth in earth's tomb and womb.

Mystic The air is a mill of hooks - Questions without answer, Glittering and drunk as flies Whose kiss stings unbearably In the fetid wombs of black air under pines in summer. I remember The dead smell of sun on wood cabins, The stiffness of sails, the long salt winding sheets. Once one has seen God, what is the remedy? Once one has been seized up Without a part left over, Not a toe, not a finger, and used, Used utterly, in the sun’s conflagrations, the stains That lengthen from ancient cathedrals What is the remedy? The pill of the Communion tablet, The walking beside still water? Memory? Or picking up the bright pieces of Christ in the faces of rodents, The tame flower- nibblers, the ones Whose hopes are so low they are comfortable - The humpback in his small, washed cottage Under the spokes of the clematis. Is there no great love, only tenderness? Does the sea Remember the walker upon it? Meaning leaks from the molecules. The chimneys of the city breathe, the window sweats, The children leap in their cots. The sun blooms, it is a geranium. The heart has not stopped.

Stacy stepped into the forest and immediately took a deep breath of the pine- and spruce-scented air she’d come to love. She’d seen pictures in books and newspapers of countries and cities around the world. She’d seen photos of tropical islands and beaches and mountain biomes. But she couldn’t imagine any biome more beautiful than their taiga forest.

For brick and mortar breed filth and crime, With a pulse of evil that throbs and beats; And men are whithered before their prime By the curse paved in with the lanes and streets. And lungs are poisoned and shoulders bowed, In the smothering reek of mill and mine; And death stalks in on the struggling crowd— But he shuns the shadow of the oak and pine

When the Papayuna is pining you need to call home.

city’s anthem, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” was written in 1954 by two gay lovers who were pining for “the city by the bay” after moving to Brooklyn Heights.

The boy will tell you my mind has gone with the dogs down the hill to the city. It’s off playing blackjack at the casino while I’m left up here in the cold.

Behind a barbed-wire fence, a dirt road disappears into the distance in the pine trees and corners. Lost, dead roads, no ends or remaining purposes, power lines now dead and sagging and forgotten, grown high in weeds and young trees. The trees have entirely encased a speed limit sign, strange sight, nothing so pointless as a speed limit sign in the midst of dense woods, pointless and beautifully so.

So, having been dismissed by his mistress while pining for a woman who belonged to another, he rode out of the city to the abandoned plantation his good friend Hugh had purchased, and hoped he had some cognac on hand.

I envied the sons their life in the country. I wasn’t even jealous of how at home they were in the fields and woods and barns; of how they could do so many things I couldn’t, drive tractors, take apart and fix motors, pluck eggs from under a hen, shove their way into a stall with a stubborn horse pushing back: I just marveled at it all, and wanted it. They and the boys who lived on farms near them were also so enviably at ease in their bodies: what back in the city would be taken as a slouch of disinterest, here was an expression of physical grace. No need to be tense when everything so readily submitted to your efficiently minimal gestures: hoisting bales of hay into a loft, priming a recalcitrant pump … Something else there was as well, something more elusive: perhaps that they lived so much of the time in a world of wild, poignant odors—mown grass, the redolent pines, even the tang of manure and horse-piss-soaked hay. Just the thought of those sensory elations inflicted me with a feeling I still have to exert myself to repress that I was squandering my time, wasting what I knew already were irretrievable clutches of years, now hecatombs of years, trapped in my trivial, stifling life.

Tonight, no one will rage and cry: "My Kingdom for a horse!" No ghost will come to haunt the battlements of a castle in the kingdom of Denmark where, apparently something is rotten. Nor will anyone wring her hands and murmur: "Leave, I do not despise you." Three still young women will not retreat to a dacha whispering the name of Moscow, their beloved, their lost hope. No sister will await the return of her brother to avenge the death of their father, no son will be forced to avenge an affront to his father, no mother will kill her three children to take revenge on their father. And no husband will see his doll-like wife leave him out of contempt. No one will turn into a rhinoceros. Maids will not plot to assassinate their mistress, after denouncing her lover and having him jailed. No one will fret about "the rain in Spain!" No one will emerge from a garbage pail to tell an absurd story. Italian families will not leave for the seashore. No soldier will return from World War II and bang on his father's bedroom dor protesting the presence of a new wife in his mother's bed. No evanescent blode will drown. No Spanish nobleman will seduce a thousand and three women, nor will an entire family of Spanish women writhe beneath the heel of the fierce Bernarda Alba. You won't see a brute of a man rip his sweat-drenched T-shirt, shouting: "Stella! Stella!" and his sister-in-law will not be doomed the minute she steps off the streetcar named Desire. Nor will you see a stepmother pine away for her new husband's youngest son. The plague will not descend upon the city of Thebes, and the Trojan War will not take place. No king will be betrayed by his ungrateful daughters. There will be no duels, no poisonings, no wracking coughs. No one will die, or, if someone must die, it will become a comic scene. No, there will be none of the usual theatrics. What you will see tonight is a very simple woman, a woman who will simply talk...

Oh, Haifa. City of glistering grime, smog hovering over foamy sea. Of blocky apartment buildings facing the coast, topped with white water tanks crowded together like flocks of squat storks. Of palm trees and pine trees and electric wires, twisting green and black toward the chalky beachfront and rows of factory smokestacks. The way you put it once, Laith, your voice warped to mimic a radio announcer: 'Welcome to Haifa: you may die an early and also agonizing carcinogenic death, but at least you'll have a killer view from your hospital room.

I remembered Ben's words when I also entered that abomination of desolation—the eastern half of the city of labor. In the little cottage in the pine wood, even in the dreariness of winter and under the drag of poverty, there had been beauty—beauty in the white, smooth, glittering enow;

None of the ginkgo's aesthetic qualities are all that different from those of other trees. I could just as easily wax poetic about the beauty of beech trees, or the majesty of ancient sugar pines. But I think that ginkgos are just unusual enough for the occasional human to take notice of them. It's not that any particular tree or breed of dog or varietal or rose is objectively superior to its peers, they just happen to be the creatures that momentarily capture our flickering attention. As soon as humans take open-hearted notice of anything in the natural world, we find reason to love it.

I also enjoy canoeing, and I suppose you will smile when I say that I especially like it on moonlight nights. I cannot, it is true, see the moon climb up the sky behind the pines and steal softly across the heavens, making a shining path for us to follow; but I know she is there, and as I lie back among the pillows and put my hand in the water, I fancy that I feel the shimmer of her garments as she passes. Sometimes a daring little fish slips between my fingers, and often a pond-lily presses shyly against my hand. Frequently, as we emerge from the shelter of a cove or inlet, I am suddenly conscious of the spaciousness of the air about me. A luminous warmth seems to enfold me. Whether it comes from the trees which have been heated by the sun, or from the water, I can never discover. I have had the same strange sensation even in the heart of the city. I have felt it on cold, stormy days and at night. It is like the kiss of warm lips on my face.

Well, at first I did; I was restless; I didn't know however I should manage to support life--you know there are such moments, especially in solitude. There was a waterfall near us, such a lovely thin streak of water, like a thread but white and moving. It fell from a great height, but it looked quite low, and it was half a mile away, though it did not seem fifty paces. I loved to listen to it at night, but it was then that I became so restless. Sometimes I went and climbed the mountain and stood there in the midst of the tall pines, all alone in the terrible silence, with our little village in the distance, and the sky so blue, and the sun so bright, and an old ruined castle on the mountain-side, far away. I used to watch the line where earth and sky met, and longed to go and seek there the key of all mysteries, thinking that I might find there a new life, perhaps some great city where life should be grander and richer--and then it struck me that life may be grand enough even in a prison.

Why does that evening's memory Return with this night's storm - A party twenty years ago, Its disappointments warm? There are so many MIGHT-HAVE-BEENS WHAT-IFS that won't stay buried Other cities, other jobs Strangers we might have married And memory insists on pining For places it never went, As if life would be happier Just by being different

Once, I saw a remarkable series of photographs which showed the different compositions of human tears. It had not ever occurred to me until that moment that tears of joy might be measurably different from tears of anger or sorrow, but they are. Cause matters. If you cry from slicing an onion, the structure of your tears resembles the undergrowth in a pine forest. Remembrance is a grid pattern, like the map of New York City, but from each block emerge soft, questing tendrils, as if the body of the tear itself reaches out for what is lost. By comparison, other tears are plain. Elation is etiolated and fragile, grief is sparse, rage is linear, horror is jagged. Of all the pictures in the collection, only remembrance was complex. So what tears, now, is my body crying up above in the daylight?

White double bloodroot and blue scilla covered yards on my path to the store. The leather knuckles of milkweed were pushing from the earth. Dark hemlocks and pine were tipped with tiny tender green needles. People wandered about like toddlers, bending over to look at last year’s dried grass. They watched the sky and examined the tags of newly planted city trees. And the air—it was a clean cold food.

The breeze was warm across my face, and even through the city lights I could see constellations: the Plough, Orion’s belt. The pine tree at the bottom of the garden rustled like the sea, ceaselessly. For a moment I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars and nocturne, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be all right.

Fort Bragg was a military base that Lee and Tomlin, as well as most members of the United States Army, were familiar with. Home of the 82nd Airborne, as well as US Army Special Operations Command, it was an infamous shit hole. Two hundred and fifty-one square miles of sand and pine trees, adjoining the city of Fayetteville, which was for the most part an old military town and had the same used-up look as all military towns.

One can sniff the ozone from the pine trees, visit the local bars, eat crawfish, and drink Dixie beer and feel as good as it is possible to feel in this awfully interesting century. And now and then, drive across the lake to New Orleans, still an entrancing city, eat trout amandine at Galatoire’s, drive home to my pleasant, uninteresting place, try to figure out how the world got into such a fix, shrug, take a drink, and listen to the frogs tune up.

If you hear in my voice… any resemblance to a voice that once was sweet music in your ears, weep for it, weep for it! If you touch, in touching my hair, anything that recalls a beloved head that lay on your breast when you were young and free, weep for it, weep for it! If, when I hint to you of a Home that is before us, where I will be true to you with all my duty and with all my faithful service, I bring back the remembrance of a Home long desolate, while your poor heart pined away, weep for it, weep for it!

The Isle of Pines was Circe's isle, with white marble columns here and there in the dark, green, and pirates would be dueling with a flash of clashing swords and a flash of recklessly smiling white teeth. The Gulf, like the Caribbean, is haunted by the ghosts of the old buccaneers. Tampico, to Pete, wasn't the industrial shipping port his father knew. It had palaces and parrots of many colors, and winding white roads. It was an Arabian Nights city, with robed magicians wandering the streets, benign most of the time, but with gnarled hands like tree-roots that could weave spells. Manoel, his father, could have told him a different story, for Manoel had shipped once under sail, in the old days, before he settled down to a fisherman's life in Cabrillo. But Manoel didn't talk a great deal. Men talk to men, not to boys, and that was why Pete didn't learn as much as he might have from the sun-browned Portuguese who went out with the fishing fleets. He got his knowledge out of books, and strange books they were, and strange knowledge. ("Before I Wake...")

If anyone seriously thinks by going natural, he will be escaping The Establishment, finally getting away from The Man and from the clutches of the good corporations, I have a bit of bad news. The corporations are way ahead of you. There are high-powered boards sitting around half-an-acre mahogany tables on the thirty-third floors of skyscrapers in New York City, and they are meeting right this minute, and they are making decisions on the marketing of the ponderosa pine bark chips, lightly salted. If you slice them thin enough, they approach being edible

On 20 November, front-line troops got 500 grams of bread per day, factory workers received 250, and everyone else 125 (that is, two slices). ‘Twigs were collected and stewed,’ records an historian of the siege. ‘Peat shavings, cottonseed cake, bonemeal was pressed into use. Pine sawdust was processed and added to the bread. Mouldy grain was dredged from sunken barges and scraped out of the holds of ships. Soon Leningrad bread was containing 10% cottonseed cake that had been processed to remove poisons. Household pets, shoe leather, fir bark and insects were consumed, as was wallpaper paste which was reputed to be made with potato flour. Guinea pigs, white mice and rabbits were saved from vivisection in the city’s laboratories for a more immediately practical fate. ‘Today it is so simple to die,’ wrote one resident, Yelena Skryabina, in her diary. ‘You just begin to lose interest, then you lie on your bed and you never get up again. Yet some people were willing to go to any lengths in order to survive: 226 people were arrested for cannibalism during the siege. ‘Human meat is being sold in the markets,’ concluded one secret NKVD report, ‘while in the cemeteries bodies pile up like carcasses, without coffins.

They all thronged round us for a moment in the little circle of light from the panting bus, their lit faces ghastly like ghosts against the black stems of the pines. This was the climax of my dream: the instant of nightmare in which it would end. I had an absurd pang of fear that they were going to attack us – a gang of terrifying soft muffled shapes – clawing us from our seats, dragging us hungrily down, in dead silence. But the moment passed. They drew back – harmless, after all, as mere ghosts – into the darkness, while our bus, with a great churning of its wheels, lurched forward towards the city, through the deep unseen snow.

The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams, ocean, and all the living things that dwell within the daedal earth; lightning, and rain, earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane, the torpor of the year when feeble dreams visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep holds every future leaf and flower; the bound with which from that detested trance they leap; the works and ways of man, their death and birth, and that of him and all that his may be; all things that move and breathe with toil and sound are born and die; revolve, subside, and swell. Power dwells apart in its tranquillity, remote, serene, and inaccessible: and this, the naked countenance of earth, on which I gaze, even these primeval mountains teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains, slow rolling on; there, many a precipice frost and the sun in scorn of mortal power have pil'd: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle, a city of death, distinct with many a tower and wall impregnable of beaming ice. Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin is there, that from the boundaries of the sky rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing its destin'd path, or in the mangled soil branchless and shatter'd stand; the rocks, drawn down from yon remotest waste, have overthrown the limits of the dead and living world, never to be reclaim'd. The dwelling-place of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil; their food and their retreat for ever gone, so much of life and joy is lost. The race of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling vanish, like smoke before the tempest's stream, and their place is not known. Below, vast caves shine in the rushing torrents' restless gleam, which from those secret chasms in tumult welling meet in the vale, and one majestic river, the breath and blood of distant lands, for ever rolls its loud waters to the ocean-waves, breathes its swift vapours to the circling air.

(...) I only know That when I have a son of mine, He shan't be made to droop and pine, Bound down and forced by rule and rod To serve a God who is no God. But I'll put custom on the shelf And make him find his God himself. Perhaps he'll find him in a tree, Some hollow trunk, where you can see. Perhaps the daisies in the sod Will open out and show him God. Or will he meet him in the roar Of breakers as they beat the shore? Or in the spiky stars that shine? Or in the rain (where I found mine)? Or in the city's giant moan? - A God who will be all his own. To whom he can address a prayer And love him, for he is so fair, And see with eyes that are not dim And build a temple to meet for him.

Dear Sawyer and Quin, If you ever read this and I'm gone I want you to know something that has been weighing on me. I watch you two play and it can be so sad sometimes. You two have been best friends since Sawyer's birth. Always inseparable. It's been adorable , but comes with its challenges. I'm worried when I watch you boys. Quinton, you are always driven by your ego. You're strong and talented, but much too determined to beat down everyone in your efforts to be the best. You push yourself to win a competition, then shove it in someone's face. I’ve rarely seen you compliment others, but you always give yourself a pat on the back. You don't play anything for the love of it, you play to win and normally do. I've seen you tear down your brother so many times just to feel good about yourself. You don't have to do that, dear. You don't have to spend your life trying to prove that you're amazing. One day you'll fail and be alone because you've climbed to the top of a pyramid with only enough room for yourself. Don't let it get to that point and if you do, learn humility from your brother. He could do without so much of it. Sawyer, just because you're most often the underdog and the peaceful introspective kid, don't think I'm letting you off the hook. Your humility has become your worst enemy. It's so intense that I wonder if it will be your vice one day, instead of your greatest virtue. It's one thing to believe you are below all men, even when you're not, but it's another thing to be crippled by fear and to no longer try. Sometimes , dear, I think you fear being good at something because you've tasted the bitterness of being the one who comes in last and you don't want to make others feel that way. That's sweet of you and I smile inside when I see you pretending to lose when you race your younger cousins , but if you always let people beat you they may never learn to work hard for something they want. It's okay to win, just win for the right reasons and always encourage those who lose. Oh, and Sawyer, I hope one day you read this. One day when it matters. If so, remember that the bottom of a mountain can be just as lonely as the top. I hope the two of you can learn to climb together one day. As I'm writing this you are trying to climb the big pine tree out back. Quin is at the top, rejoicing in his victory and taunting Sawyer. And Sawyer is at the bottom, afraid to get hurt and afraid to be sad about it. I'm going to go talk to you two separately now. I hope my words mean something. Love you boys, Mom

She leans back again against the pine’s trunk. Some slight change in the atmosphere, the humidity, and her mind becomes a greener thing. At midnight, on this hillside, perched in the dark above this city with her pine standing in for a Bo, Mimi gets enlightened. The fear of suffering that is her birthright—the frantic need to steer—blows away on the wind, and something else wings down to replace it. Messages hum from out of the bark she leans against. Chemical semaphores home in over the air. Currents rise from the soil-gripping roots, relayed over great distances through fungal synapses linked up in a network the size of the planet. The signals say: A good answer is worth reinventing from scratch, again and again. They say: The air is a mix we must keep making. They say: There’s as much belowground as above. They tell her: Do not hope or despair or predict or be caught surprised. Never capitulate, but divide, multiply, transform, conjoin, do, and endure as you have all the long day of life. There are seeds that need fire. Seeds that need freezing. Seeds that need to be swallowed, etched in digestive acid, expelled as waste. Seeds that must be smashed open before they’ll germinate. A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still. The next day dawns. The sun rises so slowly that even the birds forget there was ever anything else but dawn. People drift back through the park on their way to jobs, appointments, and other urgencies. Making a living. Some pass within a few feet of the altered woman. Mimi comes to, and speaks her very first Buddha’s words. “I’m hungry.” The answer comes from right above her head. Be hungry. “I’m thirsty.” Be thirsty. “I hurt.” Be still and feel.

They bear down upon Westminster, the ghost-consecrated Abbey, and the history-crammed Hall, through the arches of the bridge with a rush as the tide swelters round them; the city is buried in a dusky gloom save where the lights begin to gleam and trail with lurid reflections past black velvety- looking hulls - a dusky city of golden gleams. St. Paul's looms up like an immense bowl reversed, squat, un-English, and undignified in spite of its great size; they dart within the sombre shadows of the Bridge of Sighs, and pass the Tower of London, with the rising moon making the sky behind it luminous, and the crowd of shipping in front appear like a dense forest of withered pines, and then mooring their boat at the steps beyond, with a shuddering farewell look at the eel-like shadows and the glittering lights of that writhing river, with its burthen seen and invisible, they plunge into the purlieus of Wapping. ("The Phantom Model")

The bus trip from Denver to Frisco was uneventful except that my whole soul leaped to it the nearer we got to Frisco. Cheyenne again, in the afternoon this time, and then west over the range; crossing the Divide at midnight at Creston, arriving at Salt Lake City at dawn—a city of sprinklers, the least likely place for Dean to have been born; then out to Nevada in the hot sun, Reno by nightfall, its twinkling Chinese streets; then up the Sierra Nevada, pines, stars, mountain lodges signifying Frisco romances—a little girl in the back seat, crying to her mother, “Mama when do we get home to Truckee?” And Truckee itself, homey Truckee, and then down the hill to the flats of Sacramento. I suddenly realized I was in California. Warm, palmy air—air you can kiss—and palms. Along the storied Sacramento River on a superhighway; into the hills again; up, down; and suddenly the vast expanse of a bay (it was just before dawn) with the sleepy lights of Frisco festooned across.

He spent the morning at the beach. He had no idea which one, just some open stretch of coastline reaching out to the sea. An unbroken mantle of soft grey clouds was sitting low over the water. Only on the horizon was there a glimmer of light, a faint blue band of promise. The beach was deserted, not another soul on the vast, wide expanse of sand that stretched out in front of him. Having come from the city, it never ceased to amaze Jejeune that you could be that alone in the world. He walked along the beach, feeling the satisfying softness as the sand gave way beneath his slow deliberate strides. He ventured as close to the tide line as he dared, the white noise of the waves breaking on the shingles. A set of paw prints ran along the sand, with an unbroken line in between. A small dog, dragging a stick in its mouth. Always the detective, even if, these days, he wasn’t a very good one. Jejeune’s path became blocked by a narrow tidal creek carrying its silty cargo out to the sea. On each side of it were shallow lagoons and rock pools. When the tide washed in they would teem with new life, but at the moment they looked barren and empty. Jejeune looked inland, back to where the dark smudge of Corsican pines marked the edge of the coast road. He traced the creek’s sinuous course back to where it emerged from a tidal salt flat, and watched the water for a long time as it eddied and churned, meeting the incoming tide in an erotic swirl of water, the fresh intermingling with the salty in a turbulent, roiling dance, until it was no longer possible to tell one from the other. He looked out at the sea, at the motion, the color, the light. A Black-headed Gull swooped in and settled on a piece of driftwood a few feet away. Picture complete, thought Jejeune. For him, a landscape by itself, no matter how beautiful, seemed an empty thing. It needed a flicker of life, a tiny quiver of existence, to validate it, to confirm that other living things found a home here, too. Side by side, they looked out over the sea, the man and the bird, two beating hearts in this otherwise empty landscape, with no connection beyond their desire to be here, at this time. Was it the birds that attracted him to places like this, he wondered, or the solitude, the absence of demands, of expectations? But if Jejeune was unsure of his own motives, he knew this bird would have a purpose in being here. Nature always had her reasons. He chanced a sidelong glance at the bird, now settled to his presence. It had already completed its summer molt, crisp clean feathers having replaced the ones abraded by the harsh demands of eking out a living on this wild, windswept coastline. The gull stayed for a long moment, allowing Jejeune to rest his eyes softly, unthreateningly, upon it. And then, as if deciding it had allowed him enough time to appreciate its beauty, the bird spread its wings and effortlessly lifted off, wheeling on the invisible air currents, drifting away over the sea toward the horizon. p. 282-3

This was an unprecedented moment in American history as well. For the dead of the Tulsa massacre were hardly alone. Over the course of four centuries, thousands of African Americans had been the victims of murderous racism. Slaves had been shot, stabbed, and tortured to death, their bodies tossed in unmarked graves. Lynchings had claimed hundreds more, as Black men and women had their life force stolen from them beneath railroad trestles, telephone poles, and ancient oak and elm trees, their limbs creaking and swaying beneath the extra weight. And then there were the one who simply disappeared, into labor camps and county jail cells, or patches of wood and swamp, lit only by the pine knobs and kerosene lamps of their executioners. The victims of racism weren't few. They were legion. But here, in this aging cemetery in the heart of the country, was the first time than an American government -- federal, state, or local -- had ever actively set out to locate the remains of victims of American racism.

Summer Storm We stood on the rented patio While the party went on inside. You knew the groom from college. I was a friend of the bride. We hugged the brownstone wall behind us To keep our dress clothes dry And watched the sudden summer storm Floodlit against the sky. The rain was like a waterfall Of brilliant beaded light, Cool and silent as the stars The storm hid from the night. to my surprise, you took my arm - A gesture you didn't explain - And we spoke in whispers, as if we two Might imitate the rain. Then suddenly the storm receded As swiftly as it came. The doors behind us opened up. The hostess called your name. I watched you merge into the group, Aloof and yet polite. We didn't speak another word Except to say goodnight. Why does that evening's memory Return with this night's storm - A party twenty years ago, Its disappointments warm? There are so many might have beens, What ifs that won't stay buried, Other cities, other jobs, Strangers we might have married. And memory insists on pining For places it never went, As if life would be happier Just be being different.

The houses in the better part of San Francisco, in those days, were all alike and all so ugly it was a wonder even their owners did not know it. (My father called it the better part of the city because he lived there.) Most of them were built on hillsides, with two or three of their corners standing on stilts. From the sidewalk you saw the doors a dozen feet above your head, the stairs leading up to them and a flat, bare expanse of pine sheathing enclosing the stilts. Each crowded against the next without an inch to spare, the houses themselves were narrow and looked taller than they actually were. If one of them had not occasionally been painted a dull brown instead of a dull green, or if a panel of brick had not been set here and there among the panels of wood, nobody could have told where his neighbor’s left off and his own began. All of them rose straight from the sidewalks; there were no lawns, and no trees. A few blocks away there were well-proportioned and attractive houses, but the builders of our street had searched farther for their model—in a box factory, from the evidence. We were moderately rich, and nothing was too bad for us.

I’d never seen a Christmas tree so big in person. “Isn't she beautiful?” Deidra asked when she reached my side. I’d been so busy gawking I hadn't heard her approach. “It’s huge.” Again with the stating the obvious. “Where’d you get it?” “Gregory grows them at the edge of the property.” Sure, because getting a tree that big so far from the city was completely ludicrous. No wonder the entire house smelled of pine. “How’d you get it in here?” “Do you really want to know or do you want to help decorate it?” Deidra picked up my bags of presents and brought them toward the monster tree. They’d already wrapped it with white twinkle lights. “I think I saw a squirrel in there,” I teased, finally able to move. The closer I got the bigger the tree seemed.“Really?” one of the guys said, stopping mid-chorus while the others continued. A lock of gray hair fell over his forehead when he scanned the tree. “I could have sworn we’d checked to make sure none of the tenants were left over.” I chuckled at his consternation. “Chill. I didn't really see one.” Placing his hand at the center of his chest, he breathed a sigh of relief. Afterwards he rounded the tree, making sure the squirrel I’d joked about wasn't really there. Mental note:don’t tease the servants. They were way too dedicated.

The Cherokees left the beautiful mountainous land of their ancestors. They were forced to live far away, in the West, which many of them felt was the home of evil spirits. Perhaps evil spirits did dwell in the new land, for the Cherokees were never the same again after they had left their mountains. Now, no man alive in Georgia remembers the Cherokee Nation. The growing capital city of the Nation has been destroyed. There are no Cherokee women and girls left to pick the berries which grow along the creeks of the Georgia mountains. The deer which graze on the mountainsides are no more hunted by Cherokee men and boys. All that is left are names. Some of the towns and rivers in North Georgia have names which sound like music and make one think of the time when Cherokees ruled this land. There is a small town named Hiawassee and another named Ellijay. Such names sound like the wind whispering in the mountain pines. Other towns are called Rising Fawn and Talking Rock and Ball Ground. There are the rivers with strange names such as Chattahoochee, Oostenaula, Coosa, Chatooga and Etowah. Nacoochee is the name of a beautiful valley and Chattanooga the name of a great city. There are Cherokee names, given to these places a thousand years before the white man came to America. Now the Cherokees have gone. Only the names remain.

Using Holmes’s instructions, workmen in the employ of undertaker John J. O’Rourke filled a coffin with cement, then placed Holmes’s body inside and covered it with more cement. They hauled him south through the countryside to Holy Cross Cemetery, a Catholic burial ground in Delaware County, just south of Philadelphia. With great effort they transferred the heavy coffin to the cemetery’s central vault, where two Pinkerton detectives guarded the body overnight. They took turns sleeping in a white pine coffin. The next day workers opened a double grave and filled this too with cement, then inserted Holmes’s coffin. They placed more cement on top and closed the grave. “Holmes’ idea was evidently to guard his remains in every way from scientific enterprise, from the pickling vat and the knife,” the Public Ledger reported. Strange things began to happen that made Holmes’s claims about being the devil seem almost plausible. Detective Geyer became seriously ill. The warden of Moyamensing prison committed suicide. The jury foreman was electrocuted in a freak accident. The priest who delivered Holmes’s last rites was found dead on the grounds of his church of mysterious causes. The father of Emeline Cigrand was grotesquely burned in a boiler explosion. And a fire destroyed the office of District Attorney George Graham, leaving only a photograph of Holmes unscathed.

For a hitter, there’s no thrill quite like a late inning, game-changing home run. Unless, that is, the shot is called back. On July 24, 1983, Kansas City superstar George Brett was riding high after hitting a two-out, two-run homer in Yankee Stadium. The future Hall of Famer’s blast changed a 4–3 ninth inning deficit into a 5–4 Royals lead. The joy soon faded, though, when New York manager Billy Martin asked home plate umpire Tim McClelland to inspect Brett’s bat. Earlier in the season, Yankee third baseman Graig Nettles had noticed that Brett seemed to use more pine tar than the rules allowed—and Martin had saved that choice information for just such a moment as this. McClelland measured the goo on Brett’s bat, finding it exceeded the eighteen inches allowed. Brett was called out, erasing the home run and giving the Yankees a 4–3 victory. The Royals were incensed by the ruling, which was later overturned by American League president Lee McPhail, who said “games should be won and lost on the playing field—not through technicalities of the rules.” Baseball’s official acknowledgment of the “bigger picture” is reminiscent of Jesus’ approach to God’s laws. Arguing with hypocritical Pharisees, Jesus once said, “You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former” (Matthew 23:23). Our concern for the letter of the law should be balanced by an equal concern for the spirit of the law. If you’re inclined to spiritual pickiness, don’t forget the “more important matters.

Greetings and welcome to The Keltic Woodshop. Established since November of 2003 in Kansas City, Missouri, The Keltic Woodshop specializes in custom cabinetry, furniture, and unique fine wood products in a personalized old fashioned handcrafted way. We are a small shop that strives towards individual attention and detail in every item produced. The Keltic Woodshop of Kansas City specializes in the following products: Custom Cabinets and Furniture: We use worldwide exotic woods. Our custom cabinets and furniture contains Russian Birch, Brazilian Cherry, African Mahogany, Asian Teak, Knotty Pine, Walnut, Red Oak, White Oak, and Bolivian Rosewood just to name a few. Custom orders are available. Handmade Walking Sticks: Our walking sticks include handcrafted, lightweight, strong, durable, handpainted, handcarved, Handapplied finishes and stains, Alaskan Diamond Willow, Hedgeapple, Red Oak, Memosa, Spalted Birch, and Spalted Ash. Custom Made Exotic Wood Display Cases: These are handmade from hardwoods of Knotty Pine, Asian Teak, African Mahogany, Sycamore, Aniegre, African Mahogany, and Black Cherry. We will do custom orders too. Pagan and Specialty Items: We have Red Oak and White Oak Ritual Wands with gems, Washington Driftwood Healing Wands with amethyst, crystaline, and citrine points, handpainted Red Oak and Hedgeapple Viking Runes for devination. We can make custom wood boxes for your tarot cards. Customer satisfaction is our highest priority. If you are looking for unusual or exotic lumbers, then we are the shop you've been searching for. The Keltic Woodshop stands behind and gurantees each item with an owner lifetime warranty on craftsmanship of the product with a replacement, repair, or moneyback in full, no questions asked, policy. We want you happy and completely satisfied with any product you may purchase. We are not a production shop so you will find joinery of woods containing handcut dovetails, as well as mortise and tenon construction. Finishes and stains are never sprayed on, but are applied personally by hand for that quality individual touch. the-tedswoodworking.com

We had a second date that night, then a third, and then a fourth. And after each date, my new romance novel protagonist called me, just to seal the date with a sweet word. For date five, he invited me to his house on the ranch. We were clearly on some kind of a roll, and now he wanted me to see where he lived. I was in no position to say no. Since I knew his ranch was somewhat remote and likely didn’t have many restaurants nearby, I offered to bring groceries and cook him dinner. I agonized for hours over what I could possibly cook for this strapping new man in my life; clearly, no mediocre cuisine would do. I reviewed all the dishes in my sophisticated, city-girl arsenal, many of which I’d picked up during my years in Los Angeles. I finally settled on a non-vegetarian winner: Linguine with Clam Sauce--a favorite from our family vacations in Hilton Head. I made the delicious, aromatic masterpiece of butter, garlic, clams, lemon, wine, and cream in Marlboro Man’s kitchen in the country, which was lined with old pine cabinetry. And as I stood there, sipping some of the leftover white wine and admiring the fruits of my culinary labor, I was utterly confident it would be a hit. I had no idea who I was dealing with. I had no idea that this fourth-generation cattle rancher doesn’t eat minced-up little clams, let alone minced-up little clams bathed in wine and cream and tossed with long, unwieldy noodles that are difficult to negotiate. Still, he ate it. And lucky for him, his phone rang when he was more than halfway through our meal together. He’d been expecting an important call, he said, and excused himself for a good ten minutes. I didn’t want him to go away hungry--big, strong rancher and all--so when I sensed he was close to getting off the phone, I took his plate to the stove and heaped another steaming pile of fishy noodles onto his plate. And when Marlboro Man returned to the table he smiled politely, sat down, and polished off over half of his second helping before finally pushing away from the table and announcing, “Boy, am I stuffed!” I didn’t realize at the time just how romantic a gesture that had been.

Maybe nostalgia is itself the problem. A Democrat I met in Macon during a conversation we had about the local enthusiasm for Trump told me that “people want to go back to Mayberry”, the setting of the beloved old Andy Griffith Show. (As it happens, the actual model for Mayberry, Mount Airy, a bedraggled town in North Carolina, has gone all in on the Trump revolution, as the Washington Post recently reported.) Maybe it’s also true, as my liberal friends believe, that what people in this part of the country secretly long to go back to are the days when the Klan was riding high or when Quantrill was terrorizing the people of neighboring Kansas, or when Dred Scott was losing his famous court case. For sure, there is a streak of that ugly sentiment in the Trump phenomenon. But I want to suggest something different: that the nostalgic urge does not necessarily have to be a reactionary one. There is nothing un-progressive about wanting your town to thrive, about recognizing that it isn’t thriving today, about figuring out that the mid-century, liberal way worked better. For me, at least, that is how nostalgia unfolds. When I drive around this part of the country, I always do so with a WPA guidebook in hand, the better to help me locate the architectural achievements of the Roosevelt years. I used to patronize a list of restaurants supposedly favored by Harry Truman (they are slowly disappearing). And these days, as I pass Trump sign after Trump sign, I wonder what has made so many of Truman’s people cast their lot with this blustering would-be caudillo. Maybe what I’m pining for is a liberal Magic Kingdom, a non-racist midwest where things function again. For a countryside dotted with small towns where the business district has reasonable job-creating businesses in it, taverns too. For a state where the giant chain stores haven’t succeeded in putting everyone out of business. For an economy where workers can form unions and buy new cars every couple of years, where farmers enjoy the protection of the laws, and where corporate management has not been permitted to use every trick available to them to drive down wages and play desperate cities off one against the other. Maybe it’s just an impossible utopia, a shimmering Mayberry dream. But somehow I don’t think so.

Moreover, Nancy Sinatra was afflicted, as the overwhelming majority of Americans were, with monolingualism. Lana’s richer, more textured version of “Bang Bang” layered English with French and Vietnamese. Bang bang, je ne l’oublierai pas went the last line of the French version, which was echoed by Pham Duy’s Vietnamese version, We will never forget. In the pantheon of classic pop songs from Saigon, this tricolor rendition was one of the most memorable, masterfully weaving together love and violence in the enigmatic story of two lovers who, regardless of having known each other since childhood, or because of knowing each other since childhood, shoot each other down. Bang bang was the sound of memory’s pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon. We could not forget the caramel flavor of iced coffee with coarse sugar; the bowls of noodle soup eaten while squatting on the sidewalk; the strumming of a friend’s guitar while we swayed on hammocks under coconut trees; the football matches played barefoot and shirtless in alleys, squares, parks, and meadows; the pearl chokers of morning mist draped around the mountains; the labial moistness of oysters shucked on a gritty beach; the whisper of a dewy lover saying the most seductive words in our language, anh oi; the rattle of rice being threshed; the workingmen who slept in their cyclos on the streets, kept warm only by the memories of their families; the refugees who slept on every sidewalk of every city; the slow burning of patient mosquito coils; the sweetness and firmness of a mango plucked fresh from its tree; the girls who refused to talk to us and who we only pined for more; the men who had died or disappeared; the streets and homes blown away by bombshells; the streams where we swam naked and laughing; the secret grove where we spied on the nymphs who bathed and splashed with the innocence of the birds; the shadows cast by candlelight on the walls of wattled huts; the atonal tinkle of cowbells on mud roads and country paths; the barking of a hungry dog in an abandoned village; the appetizing reek of the fresh durian one wept to eat; the sight and sound of orphans howling by the dead bodies of their mothers and fathers; the stickiness of one’s shirt by afternoon, the stickiness of one’s lover by the end of lovemaking, the stickiness of our situations; the frantic squealing of pigs running for their lives as villagers gave chase; the hills afire with sunset; the crowned head of dawn rising from the sheets of the sea; the hot grasp of our mother’s hand; and while the list could go on and on and on, the point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget.

Men are not content with a simple life: they are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous; they soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not; and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others. The result is the encroachment of one group upon the territory of another, the rivalry of groups for the resources of the soil, and then war. Trade and finance develop, and bring new class-divisions. "Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, each at war with the other; and in either division there are smaller ones - you would make a great mistake if you treated them as single states". A mercantile bourgeoisie arises, whose members seek social position through wealth and conspicuous consumption: "they will spend large sums of money on their wives". These changes in the distribution of wealth produce political changes: as the wealth of the merchant over-reaches that of the land-owner, aristocracy gives way to a plutocratic oligarchy - wealthy traders and bankers rule the state. Then statesmanship, which is the coordination of social forces and the adjustment of policy to growth, is replaced by politics, which is the strategy of parts and the lust of the spoils of office. Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle. Aristocracy ruins itself by limiting too narrowly the circle within which power is confined; oligarchy ruins itself by the incautious scramble for immediate wealth. In rather case the end is revolution. When revolution comes it may seem to arise from little causes and petty whims, but though it may spring from slight occasions it is the precipitate result of grave and accumulated wrongs; when a body is weakened by neglected ills, the merest exposure may bring serious disease. Then democracy comes: the poor overcome their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing the rest; and give to the people an equal share of freedom and power. But even democracy ruins itself by excess – of democracy. Its basic principle is the equal right of all to hold office and determine public policy. This is at first glance a delightful arrangement; it becomes disastrous because the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best rulers and the wisest courses. As to the people they have no understanding, and only repeat what their rulers are pleased to tell them; to get a doctrine accepted or rejected it is only necessary to have it praised or ridiculed in a popular play (a hit, no doubt, at Aristophanes, whose comedies attacked almost every new idea). Mob-rule is a rough sea for the ship of state to ride; every wind of oratory stirs up the waters and deflects the course. The upshot of such a democracy is tyranny or autocracy; the crowd so loves flattery, it is so “hungry for honey” that at last the wiliest and most unscrupulous flatterer, calling himself the “protected of the people” rises to supreme power. (Consider the history of Rome). The more Plato thinks of it, the more astounded he is at the folly of leaving to mob caprice and gullibility the selection of political officials – not to speak of leaving it to those shady and wealth-serving strategists who pull the oligarchic wires behind the democratic stage. Plato complains that whereas in simpler matters – like shoe-making – we think only a specially-trained person will server our purpose, in politics we presume that every one who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state.

How to scale and enter the risen path was largely unknown. It all might begin in darkness, but it cast a shadow that, when viewed from the ground, was too bleak. Demolition was once a question not of “whether, but when,” until one photographer spent a year on the trail documenting what was there. 4 The scenes were “hallucinatory”—wildflowers, Queen Anne’s lace, irises, and grasses wafted next to hardwood ailanthus trees that bolted up from the soil on railroad tracks, on which rust had accumulated over the decades. 5 Steel played willing host to an exuberant, spontaneous garden that showed fealty to its unusual roots. Tulips shared the soilbed with a single pine tree outfitted with lights for the winter holidays, planted outside of a building window that opened onto the iron-bottomed greenway with views of the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty to the left and traffic, buildings, and Tenth Avenue to the right. 6 Wading through waist-high Queen Anne’s lace was like seeing “another world right in the middle of Manhattan.” 7 The scene was a kind of wildering, the German idea of ortsbewüstung, an ongoing sense of nature reclaiming its ground. 8 “You think of hidden things as small. That is how they stay hidden. But this hidden thing was huge. A huge space in New York City that had somehow escaped everybody’s notice,” said Joshua David, who cofounded a nonprofit organization with Robert Hammonds to save the railroad. 9 They called it the High Line. “It was beautiful refuse, which is kind of a scary thing because you find yourself looking forward and looking backwards at the same time,” architect Liz Diller told me in our conversation about the conversion of the tracks into a public space, done in a partnership with her architectural firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and James Corner, Principal of Field Operations, and Dutch planting designer Piet Oudolf. Other architectural plans proposed turning the High Line into a “Street in the Air” with biking, art galleries, and restaurants, but their team “saw that the ruinous state was really alive.” Joel Sternfeld, the “poet-keeper” of the walkway, put the High Line’s resonance best: “It’s more of a path than a park. And more of a Path than a path.” 10

He that builds a city, and does not intend it should increase, commits as great an absurdity, as if he should desire his child might ever continue under the same weakness in which he is born. If it do not grow, it must pine and perish; for in this world nothing is permanent; that which does not grow better will grow worse.

Levi’s Café stood in a city block of pines–just that one, small lighted building in the center of the grove. As Lyle went into the trees, the café windows were yellow stains that in the wind and rain seemed to darken and then flicker on. Instead of going in, he lingered under his umbrella. The motorcycle club gathered here each evening at five. But Lyle had offended one of the boys, Devon, who was tall and drove a Triumph and liked heavy wool sweaters–girls favored him–and he supposed they would not invite him to join now, despite his new clothing.

I lied to you,” she said with a belligerent edge. He hid a smile. “I lied to you.” “I’m domineering and used to getting my own way.” “I like a woman who knows her own mind.” “I’m stubborn and opinionated.” “If I’m contemplating a lifetime with a lassie, I want her to show a bit of spirit.” “I have no society polish. A countess should be sophisticated, whereas I’ve never had a season. I’ve never even been to London.” “Aye, you’ll settle into the Highlands well, then. My home is a long journey from the bright lights of Edinburgh—a wee wife who pines for city life would never be happy with me.” She narrowed her eyes. “I kissed you like there’s no tomorrow.” “Are you trying to convince me for or against?” Her lips twisted in self-denigration. “I’m clearly a woman of wayward morals.” He couldn’t contain his laughter. “Is that right?” Her cheeks were fiery now. “You don’t want to marry a flirt.” “If I’m the only laddie my wife flirts with, I have no objection.” Her expression was a mixture of defiance and shame. “How do you know I don’t kiss every gentleman the way I…I kissed you?” He smiled gently. “Have you ever kissed anyone else like that?” “No.” Her long eyelashes, darker honey than her hair, flickered down. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t.” She was bewitching. He’d admitted to being besotted. Every moment in her company only deepened his enchantment. “I’ll take my chances.” “Surely you want a wife you can trust.” “Apart from your…waywardness and propensity for impersonating fairytale characters, I believe you’re an admirable creature.” “Hardly.” The compliment didn’t please her. “I let you take liberties.” “As your future husband, I’d like to place it on record that I intend to take liberties at every opportunity.” He paused. “Scotland’s a gey chilly place, especially in the winter. I don’t want a cold marriage bed.” She stiffened. “There remains one insurmountable obstacle.” “What’s that?” Her delicate jaw set in an obstinate line. “I don’t want to marry you.” With

She walked until a surprisingly cold breeze swept past her. She halted. Slowly, Celaena turned north, toward the source of the breeze, which smelled of a faraway land she hadn’t seen in eight years. Pine and snow—a city still in winter’s grasp. She breathed it in, staring across the leagues of lonely, black ocean, seeing, somehow, that distant city that had once, long ago, been her home. The wind ripped the strands of hair from her braid, lashing them across her face. Orynth.

Mags said magic invited a certain amount of mess. That's why the honeysuckle grew three times as large around her house, and birds nested in her eaves no matter the season. In New Salem—the City Without Sin, where the trolleys run on time and every street wears a Saint’s name—the only birds are pigeons and the only green is the faint shine of slime in the gutters. A trolley jangles past several inches from Juniper’s toes and its driver swears at her. Juniper swears back. She keeps going because there’s no place to stop. There are no mossy stumps or blue pine groves; every corner and stoop is filled up with people. Workers and maids, priests and officers, men with pocket-watches and ladies with big hats and children selling buns and newspapers and shriveled up flowers. Juniper tries asking directions twice but the answers are baffling, riddle-like (follow St. Vincent’s to Fourth-and-Withdrop, cross the Thorn, and head straight). Within an hour she’s been invited to a boxing match, accosted by a gentleman who wants to discuss the relationship between the equinox and the end-times, and given a map that has nothing marked on it but thirty-nine churches. Juniper stares down at the map, knotted and foreign and unhelpful, and wants to go the hell home.

share your address with me and i shall send you sound remedies, prescripts for serenity, potions for city scribes plagued by commotion, pinned down in antipodes, pining for butchery when all that she really needs are soothing soliloquies, background amenities to set her swift mind at ease.

The young man squeezed by me at one point in the cramped store and I felt, through his jacket, through mine, the hard shape that could only be a gun. Only when Franco eased up beside me and said, softly, “We have stepped in it,” did I really understand what was happening. There was no place to hide in a store like that, no place to run. They were between us and the door. We just had to stand and watch and hope that when it started, the shooting, it would be quick and clean. But I had little faith in that. When two country boys pull their pistols and start popping’, chances are that they will hit what they are “shooting at. They practice, blowing beer cans off fence posts, or stalking deer through the pines. But city boys can’t shoot for shit. It is why they kill so many children and innocent bystanders. They keep their guns in their waistbands because they like the way it feels against their skin, but they are amateurs at killing.

Milo Pine did not run a smugglers’ hotel, but his parents did. It was an inn, actually; a huge, ramshackle manor house that looked as if it had been cobbled together from discarded pieces of a dozen mismatched mansions collected from a dozen different cities. It was called Greenglass House, and it sat on the side of a hill overlooking an inlet of harbors, a little district built half on the shore and half on the piers that jutted out into the river Skidwrack like the teeth of a comb. It was a long climb up to the inn from the waterfront by foot, or an only slightly shorter trip by the cable railway that led from the inn’s private dock up the steep slope of Whilforber Hill. And of course the inn wasn’t only for smugglers, but that was who turned up most often, so that was how Milo thought of it.

The hostess extended her swanlike neck and opened her mouth to the fullest. "Aaaahhhaaaahhhhheeeeaaaahhhh!" Somewhere in the depths of the pine forest an identical sound reverberated. "An echo!" exclaimed Frannie. "No," smiled Helena. "Sybil Manigault. She's into nature.

In Mexico City, air pollution, acid rain, photochemical oxidants and soil erosion have been killing off the city’s plants and trees for decades. The sycamore trees that lined Avenida Reforma in the 1990s all died, and in 2005 thousands of sickly trees in Chapultepec Park had to be cut down due to deterioration from the effects of air pollution. The greatest damage caused by air pollution occurs within the forests that surround the city, especially among the pine tress in the woods of Ajusco and the Desierto de los Leones, two main oxygen sources of the city.

A city is alive. Supposing you were a great slow giant, like a Counting Pine, and looking down at a city? You'd see buildings grow; you'd see attackers driven off; you'd see fires put out. You'd see the city was alive but you wouldn't see people, because they'd move too fast. The life of a city, the thing that drives it, isn't some sort of mysterious force. The life of a city is people.

Hassler flips burgers on a grill in the shadow of the remnants of the Seattle Gas Light Company, a collection of rusted cylinders and ironwork that looms in the distance like the ruins of a steampunk skyline. The expanse of emerald grass runs down to the edge of Lake Union, which sparkles under the late afternoon sun. It’s June. It’s warm. The entire city seems to be out taking advantage of this rare, perfect day.

The Trail-Makers NORTH and west along the coast among the misty islands, Sullen in the grip of night and smiling in the day: Nunivak and Akutan, with Nome against the highlands, On we drove with plated prow agleam with frozen spray. Loud we sang adventuring and lustily we jested; Quarreled, fought, and then forgot the taunt, the blow, the jeers; Named a friend and clasped a hand—a compact sealed, attested; Shared tobacco, yarns, and drink, and planned surpassing years. Then—the snow that locked the trail where famine's shadow followed Out across the blinding white and through the stabbing cold, Past tents along the tundra over faces blotched and hollowed; Toothless mouths that babbled foolish songs of hidden gold. Wisdom, lacking sinews for the toil, gave over trying; Fools, with thews of iron, blundered on and won the fight; Weaklings drifted homeward; else they tarried—worse than dying— With the painted lips and wastrels on the edges of the night. Berries of the saskatoon were ripening and falling; Flowers decked the barren with its timber scant and low; All along the river-trail were many voices calling, And e'en the whimpering Malemutes they heard—and whined to go. Eyelids seared with fire and ice and frosted parka-edges; Firelight like a spray of blood on faces lean and brown; Shifting shadows of the pines across our loaded sledges, And far behind the fading trail, the lights and lures of town. So we played the bitter game nor asked for praise or pity: Wind and wolf they found the bones that blazed out lonely trails.... Where a dozen shacks were set, to-day there blooms a city; Now where once was empty blue, there pass a thousand sails. Scarce a peak that does not mark the grave of those who perished Nameless, lost to lips of men who followed, gleaning fame From the soundless triumph of adventurers who cherished Naught above the glory of a chance to play the game. Half the toil—and we had won to wealth in other station; Rusted out as useless ere our worth was tried and known. But the Hand that made us caught us up and hewed a nation From the frozen fastness that so long was His alone. . . . . . . Loud we sang adventuring and lustily we jested; Quarreled, fought, and then forgot the taunt, the blow, the jeers; Sinned and slaved and vanished—we, the giant-men who wrested Truth from out a dream wherein we planned surpassing years.

The forest smelled fresh here and the ground was soft, carpeted by leaves and fallen pine needles. It was tranquil and enchanting in its way. Ursula was lovely; she just wasn’t a naiad. Her hair was dark and sleek, and so long it fell below her waist, swaying this way and that as she walked. Her eyes were a piercing blue, always aware, and she had a keen eye for the smallest details. She may have been a merchant, but she’d also trained as an archer for the city militia, and she could easily spot movement at a distance. That was her intention now; it was just a different kind of movement.

Tears blurred my vision and I had to wipe my eyes with my left hand, while holding the hose with my right. For all my efforts, the fire curled tight and fierce up into the darkened sky. And still, the barking continued like a hammer striking raw metal at my back. As I pulled the hose one more time to stretch it to the limit, I sensed movement off to my left. Fletcher Enloe, my neighbor and tireless commentator that city folks, like me, don’t belong in the mountains, emerged from the pine thicket separating our houses. A canvas, pork-pie fishing hat squeezed low over his thick gray hair, and his wiry body listed from the weight of a dark roll slung over his shoulder.

Coyote Mountain too much for her, alone with pine trees up to your neck, wooden bench by the Pecos River which runs silver in the winter untold. Dust-bit dirt lonely Indians with wet brown bellies which the moon shines upon like a frosty lake, the silver show of market stalls and paintings of four pitiful horses likes of which the Spanish brought under the Mexican memory of nightfall but the old Ming china-woman on her rickety bicycle with broken straw hat with bow-legged strength,simply; the perfect depiction of the fellaheen world riddled with ancient endeavour, the old china women of the world you’ll find them so perfect in all your cities under the twinkle of stars. The would be fishermen of dawn, collected wintery downpours and sunlight situations which never beckon further than his share, meant on this earth , match stick motels which warp your loving tales of good mornings or whichever is left.

The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car. We shall use up tires, wear out road surfaces and gears, consume oil and gasoline. All of which will necessitate a great deal of work … enough for all. —LE CORBUSIER, THE RADIANT CITY (1967)

the old and worn buildings held a theatrical magic to their fading façades. They were weathered almost by design; they almost looked like they had been lifted from some stage designer's idyllic dream for an opera setting. The dusty, powdery ochres, terracottas, pale blues and pine greens lit by that soft morning glow; the comforting sun's ascent to its daily station, high and shining above that glorious, sparkling old city.

It was not Buckkeep itself or city life that I pined for, but my childhood and the friends I had known. In that I was safe; it was impossible to return to that time.

Photosynthesis by Skylar Stone Backroads Are never paved by a girl like me Can’t be seen No emerald But the leaving I’ve seen Still lies right before me I’m a spoonful of polish Just blind trust turned faithless But my world doesn’t matter here And my porcelain life is behind me I found peace in these clashin’ chairs Never knew such a small life could free me In the pines, by the water In the arms of another Little hands with big hearts find me And I find peace My life Is tailored to fit just so Never chosen Then you came Set fire to the lies I honed Now I’m hoping The future is perfect, Strip me down to human But my world doesn’t matter here And my porcelain life is behind me I found peace in the calmer air In the simplicity of a new dream In the pines, by the water In the arms of a lover Little hands with big hearts find me And I find peace Breathing in until my lungs cry It’s like I’m forced here, trapped in two lives Oh, the peace I’ve found Or my old doll house Breathing out the love you’ve shown me Got a bird’s eye view of healing Found in innocence Photosynthesis ‘Cause my world doesn’t matter here I left that version of me in the city I found home in a broken glass I found home in the words that he gave me In the pines, by the water In the arms of a lover Little hands with big hearts find me And I find peace

Little is new to me. And what I wanted from my life, I have had, and more. I have had my whole life. Days like the leaves of the forest. I’m an old hollow tree, only the roots live. And so I dream only what all men dream. I have no visions and no wishes. I see what is. I see the fruit ripening on the branch. Four years it has been ripening, that fruit of the deep-planted tree. We have all been afraid for four years, even we who live far from the yumens’ cities, and have only glimpsed them from hiding, or seen their ships fly over, or looked at the dead places where they cut down the world, or heard mere tales of these things. We are all afraid. Children wake from sleep crying of giants; women will not go far on their trading-journeys; men in the Lodges cannot sing. The fruit of fear is ripening. And I see you gather it. You are the harvester. All that we fear to know, you have seen, you have known: exile, shame, pain, the roof and walls of the world fallen, the mother dead in misery, the children untaught, uncherished. . . . This is a new time for the world: a bad time. And you have suffered it all. You have gone farthest. And at the farthest, at the end of the black path, there grows the Tree; there the fruit ripens; now you reach up, Selver, now you gather it. And the world changes wholly, when a man holds in his hand the fruit of that tree, whose roots are deeper than the forest. Men will know it. They will know you, as we did. It doesn’t take an old man or a Great Dreamer to recognize a god! Where you go, fire burns; only the blind cannot see it. But listen, Selver, this is what I see that perhaps others do not, this is why I have loved you: I dreamed of you before we met here. You were walking on a path, and behind you the young trees grew up, oak and birch, willow and holly, fir and pine, alder, elm, white-flowering ash, all the roof and walls of the world, forever renewed.

Was it possible to pine for a place I’d been perfectly happy to leave? For a long time while I worked on my ‘love where you live’ experiments, I had thought of place attachment as an either-or proposition: either you adored your city and stayed there forever in connubial bliss, or you didn’t. Moving was a failure of commitment and love.

When I was ten we moved seven miles outside the city, out past the Christmas-tree farms and the hiking trails of Spencer Butte Park to a house in the woods. It sat on nearly five acres of land, where flocks of wild turkeys roamed picking for insects in the grass and my dad could drive his riding mower in the nude if he wanted to, shielded by thousands of ponderosa pines, no neighbors for miles. Out back, there was a clearing where my mother grew rhododendrons and kept the lawn kempt. Beyond it the land gave way to sloping hills of stiff grass and red clay. There was a man-made pond filled with muddy water and soft silt, and salamanders and frogs to chase after, catch, and release. Blackberry bramble grew wild and in the early summer, during the burning season, my father would take to it with a large pair of gardening shears and clear new pathways between the trees to form a circuit he could round on his dirt bike. Once a month he’d ignite the burn piles he’d gathered, letting me squeeze the lighter fluid onto their bases, and we’d admire his handiwork as the six-foot bonfires went up in flames.

But blade met cloth and rotting flesh and ancient bone. And for the first time, perhaps the only time in that world, a Reaper bled. It screamed, the sound as piercing as a hawk’s cry. The others keened in horror and rage. The Starsword sang with light, her power flowing into it. Activating it. And nothing had ever felt so right, so easy, as plunging the blade into the bony chest of the wounded Reaper. It arced, bellowing, black blood spurting from its withered lips. The others screamed then. So loud she thought the sewer might come down, so loud she nearly dropped the blade to cover her ears. The Reapers surged, but Cormac appeared before her in a plume of shadows. He grabbed her around the middle, nearly tackling her, and they were gone. Wind roared and the world spun out from beneath her, but— They landed inside the Aux training center. Ruhn was coughing on the floor beside her, the polished pine scrubbed clean except where the three of them dripped sewer water. “You can fucking teleport?” Bryce gasped out, twisting to where Cormac stood. But Cormac’s gaze was on the Starsword, his face ashen. Bryce peered at the blade she clenched in a white-knuckled grip. As if her hand refused to let go. With shaking fingers, she put it back into its sheath. Dimmed its light. But the Starsword still sang, and Bryce had no idea what to make of it. Of the blade that had slain that which was unkillable.

The following year, Kramer would put on Just Say No, "a play about a farce" based in the fictional country of New Columbia, wherein everyone call's the president "Daddy", the First Lady is a harridan named "Mrs. Potentate" and the couple's ballet dancer son pines for his Secret Service detail

We moved to Eugene, Oregon, a small college town in the Pacific Northwest. The city sits near the source of the Willamette River, which stretches 150 miles north, from the Calapooya Mountains outside of town to its mouth on the Columbia. Carving its way between mountains, the Cascade Range to the east and the Oregon Coast Range to the west, the river defines a fertile valley where tens of thousands of years ago a series of ice age floods surged southwest from Lake Missoula, traveling over eastern Washington and bringing with their floodwaters rich soil and volcanic rock that now shore up the layers of its earth, alluvial plains fit for a vast variety of agriculture. The town itself is coated in green, hugging the banks of the river and spreading out up into the rugged hills and pine forests of central Oregon. The seasons are mild, drizzly, and gray for most of the year but give way to a lush, unspoiled summer. It rains incessantly and yet I never knew an Oregonian to carry an umbrella. Eugenians are proud of the regional bounty and were passionate about incorporating local, seasonal, and organic ingredients well before it was back in vogue. Anglers are kept busy in fresh waters, fishing for wild chinook salmon in the spring and steelhead in the summer, and sweet Dungeness crab is abundant in the estuaries year-round. Local farmers gather every Saturday downtown to sell homegrown organic produce and honey, foraged mushrooms, and wild berries. The general demographic is of hippies who protest Whole Foods in favor of local co-ops, wear Birkenstocks, weave hair wraps to sell at outdoor markets, and make their own nut butter. They are men with birth names like Herb and River and women called Forest and Aurora.

Bang bang was the sound of memory’s pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon. We could not forget the caramel flavor of iced coffee with coarse sugar; the bowls of noodle soup eaten while squatting on the sidewalk; the strumming of a friend’s guitar while we swayed on hammocks under coconut trees; the football matches played barefoot and shirtless in alleys, squares, parks, and meadows; the pearl chokers of morning mist draped around the mountains; the labial moistness of oysters shucked on a gritty beach; the whisper of a dewy lover saying the most seductive words in our language, anh oi; the rattle of rice being threshed; the workingmen who slept in their cyclos on the streets, kept warm only by the memories of their families; the refugees who slept on every sidewalk of every city; the slow burning of patient mosquito coils; the sweetness and firmness of a mango plucked fresh from its tree; the girls who refused to talk to us and who we only pined for more; the men who had died or disappeared; the streets and homes blown away by bombshells; the streams where we swam naked and laughing; the secret grove where we spied on the nymphs who bathed and splashed with the innocence of the birds; the shadows cast by candlelight on the walls of wattled huts; the atonal tinkle of cowbells on mud roads and country paths; the barking of a hungry dog in an abandoned village; the appetizing reek of the fresh durian one wept to eat; the sight and sound of orphans howling by the dead bodies of their mothers and fathers; the stickiness of one’s shirt by afternoon, the stickiness of one’s lover by the end of lovemaking, the stickiness of our situations; the frantic squealing of pigs running for their lives as villagers gave chase; the hills afire with sunset; the crowned head of dawn rising from the sheets of the sea; the hot grasp of our mother’s hand; and while the list could go on and on and on, the point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget.

To which city does she go Shenazcasas, 28102023 And then she goes to the city of dreams And her to the city of whims And her to the city of pines And her to the city of whines And now she turns to the city of creed And her never to the city of greed And her to the city of witties And her never to the city of treaties And lastly she hopes to be in the city of glory And her never to the city of worry And her to the city of merry And her never to the city where she shall remarry.

A stately row of Monterey pines lined the highway on either side of the security gates.

They spent the night tucked beneath a spare scrap of canvas in the boat bottom, listening to the sluicing of waves against the pine-tarred hull and watching the night wheel over them like a dancer's star-studded skirt. Ade nestled into the softness of his arm and thought about happily-ever-afters and sweet-tasting endings. Yule thought about once-upon-a-times and bold beginnings. At dawn they departed. When asked what she wanted to see, Ade replied, "Everything," so Yule obediently charted a course toward everything. They docked first at the City of Sissly, where Ade could admire the pink domes of the local chapels and taste the pepper-bite of fresh gwanna fruit. Then they stayed three nights on the abandoned Island of Tho, where the ruins of a failed City loomed like broken gray teeth against the sun, before skipping along a string of low, sand-scoured islands too small to be named. They walked the streets of the City of Yef and slept in the cool grottoes of the City of Jungil, and walked across the famed bridge connecting the twin Cities of Iyo and Ivo. They sailed north and west, following the summer currents out of the sweating heat of the equator, and saw Cities so distant even Yule had only read their names on his charts.

She looked at the city streets coated in rain, the early light illuminating their inky blackness, their darkness beautifully framed by the lighter concrete gutters and sidewalks. Broadway looks just like a big blackberry galette, Sam thought, before shaking her head at the terrible analogy. That would have earned a C minus in English lit, she thought, but my instructors at culinary school would be proud. Sam slowed for a second and considered the streets. So would my family, she added. New York had its own otherworldly beauty, stunning in its own sensory-overload sort of way, but a jarring juxtaposition to where Sam had grown up: on a family orchard in northern Michigan. Our skyscrapers were apple and peach trees, Sam thought, seeing dancing fruit in her mind once again. She smiled as she approached Union Square Park and stopped to touch an iridescent green leaf, still wet and dripping rain, her heart leaping at its incredible tenderness in the midst of the city. She leaned in and lifted the leaf to her nose, inhaling, the scents of summer and smells of her past- fresh fruit, fragrant pine, baking pies, lake water- flooding her mind.

Six months later I ventured to return home. I quote from my diary written in the summer of 1761 : ‘I am back in my beloved city. The scene of desolation fills my eyes with tears. At every step my distress and agitation increases. I cannot recognize houses or landmarks I once knew well. Of the former inhabitants, there is no trace. Everywhere there is a terrible emptiness. All at once I find myself in the quarter where I once resided. I recall the life I used to live : meeting friends in the evenings, reciting poetry, making love, spending sleepless nights pining for beautiful women and writing verses on their long tresses which held me captive. That was life! What is there left of it ? Nothing. Not a soul with whom I can pass a few pleasant moments in conversation ! I come away from the lane and stand on the deserted road, gaping in stunned silence at the scene of devastation. I make a vow that as long as I live, I will never come this way again. Delhi is a city where dust drifts in deserted lanes; in days gone by in this very city a man could fill his lap with gold.

As the late sun descended into the ocean, it seemed to trail ragged strips of black cloud with it, like a burning red planet settling into the Pacific’s watery green rim. When the entire coastline was awash in a pink light you could see almost every geological and floral characteristic of the American continent tumbling from the purple crests of the Santa Monica Mountains into the curling line of foam that slid up onto the beaches: dry hills of chaparral, mesquite, and scrub oak, clumps of eucalyptus and bottlebrush trees, torrey and ponderosa pine growing between blue-tiled stucco houses, coral walls overgrown with bougainvillea, terraced hillside gardens filled with oleander, yucca plants, and trellises dripping with passion vine, and orange groves whose irrigation ditches looked like quicksilver in the sun’s afterglow. Then millions of lights came on in the canyons, along the freeways, and through the vast sweep of the Los Angeles basin, and it was almost as if you were looking down upon the end point of the American dream, a geographical poem into which all our highways eventually led, a city of illusion founded by conquistadors and missionaries and consigned to the care of angels, where far below the spinning propellers of our seaplane black kids along palm-tree-lined streets in Watts hunted each other with automatic weapons.

Moreover, Nancy Sinatra was afflicted, as the overwhelming majority of Americans were, with monolingualism. Lana’s richer, more textured version of “Bang Bang” layered English with French and Vietnamese. Bang bang, je ne l’oublierai pas went the last line of the French version, which was echoed by Pham Duy’s Vietnamese version, We will never forget. In the pantheon of classic pop songs from Saigon, this tricolor rendition was one of the most memorable, masterfully weaving together love and violence in the enigmatic story of two lovers who, regardless of having known each other since childhood, or because of knowing each other since childhood, shoot each other down. Bang bang was the sound of memory’s pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon. We could not forget the caramel flavor of iced coffee with coarse sugar; the bowls of noodle soup eaten while squatting on the sidewalk; the strumming of a friend’s guitar while we swayed on hammocks under coconut trees; the football matches played barefoot and shirtless in alleys, squares, parks, and meadows; the pearl chokers of morning mist draped around the mountains; the labial moistness of oysters shucked on a gritty beach; the whisper of a dewy lover saying the most seductive words in our language, anh oi; the rattle of rice being threshed; the workingmen who slept in their cyclos on the streets, kept warm only by the memories of their families; the refugees who slept on every sidewalk of every city; the slow burning of patient mosquito coils; the sweetness and firmness of a mango plucked fresh from its tree; the girls who refused to talk to us and who we only pined for more; the men who had died or disappeared; the streets and homes blown away by bombshells; the streams where we swam naked and laughing; the secret grove where we spied on the nymphs who bathed and splashed with the innocence of the birds; the shadows cast by candlelight on the walls of wattled huts; the atonal tinkle of cowbells on mud roads and country paths; the barking of a hungry dog in an abandoned village; the appetizing reek of the fresh durian one wept to eat; the sight and sound of orphans howling by the dead bodies of their mothers and fathers; the stickiness of one’s shirt by afternoon, the stickiness of one’s lover by the end of lovemaking, the stickiness of our situations; the frantic squealing of pigs running for their lives as villagers gave chase; the hills afire with sunset; the crowned head of dawn rising from the sheets of the sea; the hot grasp of our mother’s hand; and while the list could go on and on and on, the point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget. When Lana was finished, the audience clapped, whistled, and stomped, but I sat silent and stunned as she bowed and gracefully withdrew, so disarmed I could not even applaud.

Does Kurokawa feel that deep-time thinking in business is better than short-term thinking? He is an even-minded person, and I admit that I expected him to reply that both are important. Instead he said, "Of course." He offered one more history lesson: in 1915, Tokyo decided to commemorate their recently deceased emperor with a Shinto shrine and sacred forest. At the time, the area they selected was marshy farmland on the outskirts of the city. The forester planned out the project in stages, beginning with a hundred thousand young trees that would be planted around the few existing pines. Over a hundred years, a broad-leaf woods of oak, chinquapin and camphor trees would rise to become an untended forest. No one involved in the planning would live to see the final outcome. Today the mature forest covers a slow-rising hill alongside Harajuku subway station. It's a green respite, where a sense of calm prevails and there's clean air for your lungs-and it is surrounded to the horizon on every side by the megalopolis of Toyko. Kurokawa became speechless with awe at the brilliance of the deep-time vision. 'If you don't think that way,' he said at last, 'what kind of passion do you have for human life?

Charlie used to call me “Lonesome Pine.” There I was, walking the city late at night, doing my monologues from O’Neill and Shakespeare on the dark, silent streets, usually in back of warehouses. New York gave me the cool nights and the gift of empty streets to practice on. My audience was the stars and the buildings and the cars parked nearby. If anyone walked past, they would have thought I was crazy; if animal services drove by they’d have netted me like a stray dog. Then I’d get home to my room somewhere in the stratosphere of Manhattan island, alone again, and I’d ponder what the next day would bring. It always did bring something. Perhaps a new encounter, another usher job, or a trek downtown to Washington Square, where Charlie and I would sit and have Chock full o’Nuts coffee on some bench in that park in the middle of winter. Maybe I’d sleep on the stage at the Actors Gallery, like I did when I was performing in Creditors, and Charlie would meet me there in the morning. It was okay. It was all okay.