Gunplay

At the paternal family farm, there were my teetotaling great-grandparents living in their crackerbox house, where they had eked out a sort of a living. They were German and Norwegian and Lutheran. Everything smelled like old people and dust. My paternal great-grandfather managed to buy a place where, during the Depression, they could shoot possums […]

Gypsy

I always wanted to be a gypsy for Halloween. Scarves, jewelry, long skirts. I had never seen an actual gypsy. It was only when I went to Rome that I encountered one, a woman prostrate on the sidewalk. I was walking around the Vatican, from St. Peter’s square to the museum entrance. There was some […]

Problems

Is a squirrel a problem? When I first moved into this place, there were spiders. Spiders, spiders everywhere, and not a drop to drink. I screamed when I saw them, and ran into another room, and my stomach tangled, and I wanted a fetal position and a security detail. I cried. Today, when I see […]

Of the Available Moustaches

“How he got in my pajamas I’ll never know.” Salvador Dali loved the Marx Brothers. Dali wrote an outline for a surrealist film he hoped they might star in. In Groucho, Stefan Kanfer reports that the outline went like this: “Groucho lets go of the arm and the scissors. They go down to the street […]