Like the poor the sparrows we will always have with us, my neighbor lady tells me as she feeds the birds

Willie in his 80s now hadn’t made sense in years. His wife understood his grunts from the recliner where she propped him up

It was an ancient city. All the young people left as soon as they could but the old remained in their mortgaged huts

Smitty isn’t Schulte. He doesn’t drive a Cadillac and doesn’t hit his wife often any more. Schulte, on the other hand,

Jimmy and Billy, two young men in kindergarten, went home from school every day just before noon. They lived in a small town in Nebraska, in the middle of farm country. It was the 1950s...

In 1961, Newton Minow said television is a vast wasteland. I was reading four papers a day th… and seldom watched television, had no opinion on what he said.

Grandma Gretchen’s in her rocker and she has something to say. She tells a visitor, a young man from the city, if he plans to write a book about life on a farm in the Fifties, he likely...

That my parents were Irish immigrants is probably the most significant factor in my writing life. The English expelled my father from Ireland around 1920 at age 18 or so for running gun...

“Tell Pablo I cannot see!” says the man in the Picasso painti… as I pass by, program in hand. The man has a hairy nose where each of his ears should be.

Some choose not to have children others maybe one or two three seems to be the max now it’s not like when Paul was young and a family might have had six or…

We worry so much because we’re nice people. We want to find a way to feed the poor house the poor

Virgil comes to group therapy every week in his pick-up truck with his dog, Buster, standing in the bed of the truck. The sessions are held for veterans of Korea and Vietnam. Quite a fe...

It’s a matter of beans, says Rosie, 79, legally blind, her fingers dancing across a Bible in braille, when a reporter asks her about

If love’s real, not the puppy kind, it’s not just a feeling but an act of the will a constant giving