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INTO THE FEN I often wonder how the very next essay will form or coalesce in mind, how I will stumble-slosh through the reeds into the marsh and maybe end up on a slippery embankment not even imagined before entering the bog. In a few minutes I will go to the local community gym to meet with a physical fitness trainer which is my attempt at remaining mortal for the time left to me. With walking an hour a day and incorporating strength training perhaps my cardiovascular disease will ease, but that is a self-taught aspiration which has no basis in fact. What…

WHITE SHOULDERS The thing about Marlene was that she was a fantasy personified. Yes, I loved her, I had tumultuous sex with her, I floated in the perfume she favored (White Shoulders), I reveled in how pretty she was. She was the proverbially cute-as-a-button shiksa. She did not walk, she strode: at once feminine and athletic, thin, maybe too thin. When I first saw her in the school hallway she had weight on her. Clearly she made a choice and lost weight. I would later discover how determined and strong-willed she could be. Her breasts were diminutive, which reminds me…

ON MARLENE As I look back at memorable summers in Woodstock I had no idea that they were to be so impactful as to obtain the status of emblematic experiences. I was purely experiencing people and place, not observing, which is the more reflective stance to assume. Nearing my end as it is the autumn of my life, I can take a better measure of who I was and who I am at this moment. It is the gift of old age, if you avail yourself of it. The separating and divorcing of my wife was manumission, but a slave…

    COTTON CANDY AND KITES Centuries ago I lived in Brighton Beach and then Manhattan Beach, two communities on the south shore of Brooklyn. If you took transit, or the El above Brighton Beach Avenue, you would come to Coney Island, even then a soiled slut of an area. It could serve as a set for “Nightmare Alley.” Steeplechase Park was here, as well as the dizzying spire of the parachute jump which still stands like a frozen, rusted Transformer. I rode that aerial ride at 17 and it was frightening; in those days you “sat” on a skimpy wooden plank with…