Bill hates to go to parties but he loves to go to wakes. One of the advantages of being old, he says, is that there are fewer parties to go to but a lot more wakes. At parties he finds ...

After services on Sunday the old Marlboro man puts his Bible under his arm and talks to his pastor through a hole in his neck.

Something’s still bright when a widow dies and her son flies in gives her body to science has the movers

Better take his wife to lunch after what he said yesterday. A slip of the tongue. But where to take her? The Chinese buffet?

You were gone when I got home at midnight from a double shift. Now you’re back,

There are a lot of people like me neither rich nor poor, idling in the middle who have never wante… for anything in our lives. We were reared by parents

Old barber shop in a neighborhood never posh now poor. A single chair with an ancient barber

So this Mick on the next stool, who’s as serious as Yeats but looks like Wilde, stares at me, with eyes crossed,

The last visitor before I sleep is always the old priest puffing up the stairs to my door, a wine cask under each arm, a loaf of pumpernickel in his teet…

It’s one thing to work in an office because your skills say you must. It’s another to want to hang out with

For years leprechauns lived under Pop’s fedora. They danced jigs on his head when he wore it and hid in his ears

Not a leaf left on the crabapple t… instead little red apples hang like ornaments on a Christmas tree… Little red apples that spend most of the winter covered with sn…

Dad hit me only once, an uppercut to the solar plexus. It nearly lifted me off my feet. I was 17 then and already fairly tall, 6’1.” He was 48 and of medium height, 5’8,” a fireplug who...

An odd bobcat my father was looked more like a Siamese asleep in his recliner