The Drift & Dribble Miscellany

With the buffeting winds at your face, listen carefully for the tranquil trickle of the burn--a small creek--that runs down the hill right next to the old croft building....

What was it like to be considered a foreigner in your birthplace of Vienna because your father was from Turkey?...

On a blistering day in late July, a few weeks after my husband’s death, slightly maddened by fresh grief and by a jolting sense of possibility,...

Ever since my skating coach Cecilia said I wasn’t worth teaching and I wet my pants in my lesson, I’ve been lighting fires. Small fires, at first, double-ringed with stones...

Hank and I had been awake long enough that the apartment felt borrowed. It was a three month rental north of Prospect Park, probably one block into Greenpoint, but I still told people...

Laika was only as wise as that one revolution, the Carnation revolution in April 1974, in Portugal. The others had happened before her time....

“Sometimes, to be funny, one must lie a little,” so said the Fox in The Little Prince. Playing fast and loose with the facts would also be a fair way to describe my dad’s approach to storytelling...

A list found under a newspaper at closing time in the coffee shop: Things he forgot:...

Every Sunday I run my long run of between 12 to 20 kilometers (Avenida Mate de Luna in San Miguel de Tucumán, northwestern Argentina)...

Nettie Brown stood at the top of the worn but freshly scrubbed stone steps, composing herself with a restless thumb on the latch of her front door...

You see her. About thirty yards away. Standing near one of the benches in the park at Lake Merritt. You almost speak your fears aloud, then clamp your lips before any...

‘Shorebird’. The name on the houseboat was painted in cursive font on the prow, each letter carefully picked out in black and gold...

Midnight. The harrowing, brutal thunderstorm ends as abruptly as it began. The power goes out as an eerie quiet falls over our neighborhood. The TV snapped...

I wake up from my dream. The story of the princess kitten sisters and their friend Jesus Christ becomes harder to remember...

“Last night I again assembled
All the dead I’ve loved—...

Melancholia
Poets come by melancholy
easily. Jealousy kicks hard,...

Purchase an iguana as soon as you become an empty nester and the house vibe needs some spicing up. Settle the iguana in a...

Somebody Else walked into the gas station bathroom. He followed Somebody Else inside, the heavy metal door slamming behind them. It was...

We stamp collectors are a vanishing species. Most of us who continue to collect, stubbornly unperturbed by the digital tsunami that has all but destroyed the purpose for postage stamps,...

List of things I Have Actually Worried About
The sun using up its nuclear fuel.
Being wrong about the nonexistence of God.

This is a factual report, not a story. It summarizes my investigation into what happened to that band of pals who got dubbed, as a gibe at their Italian descent, the Farabutti: the crooks...

Soccer cleats
Returned: no longer interested
Practice is too far from Dad’s now. “Boring.”...

We storm the beachhead of the Harper Hall dormitory in beat-up, rust-covered, sputtering Pintos, in borrowed pickups and leased U-hauls, in the shiny red Italian sportscars our daddies unwisely bought us...

Along the way from the Waquoit Bay channel to Falmouth Heights the outflows of the lesser channels provided challenging yet playful distortions...

He knew he and his brother wouldn’t be told the real story. Or maybe his brother did know the truth because he was older. Their parents sat them down...

Not a morning person, Miranda, clad in her bathrobe, lumbered into the kitchen at 6:40 in the morning and was startled to encounter an unfamiliar man all-too-familiarly making coffee with her De’Longhi espresso machine...

It’s on a cloud-free and ordinary day like this when it hits, as if all those years in-between were only for the plethora of insignificant things; empty blue skies and dark clouds testing her, waiting...

a wind knows flame in apophatic lust
“for you are not the solitude of birth”...

Volvo has an impressive history of safety innovations going back decades. Examples include the padded dashboard, the three-point seat belt, and pertinent to this story, it was among the first automakers to install a...

He hung a left off Roscoe, onto a deserted, derelict section of North Lincoln Avenue, briskly striding toward one of Chicago's Six Corners: Lincoln, Belmont, and Ashland Avenues. The air was crisp, the sky clear that November night. Exhaled breath turned a pale yellow under the sodium vapor street lamps ....

I struck gold with this Royal Talens sketchbook I picked up in Gothenburg, Sweden. The cadmium red hardbound cover caught my eye and the creamy pages were a hefty weight (similar to old Moleskines but...

Can you feel it, that biting cold of the morning, every bit of you damp and wanting? Sleep still over you like a heavy, wet blanket, frost eating gently away at the porthole window? Early morning, so early the sun hasn’t yet risen, and the fog is still...

It took nine hours to get to this Spanish colonial city northwest of Mexico City from Providence airport. It was worth the journey. It was February 2020. COVID was on the horizon...

Jackie took her place on line at Leaf and Bean, glancing around the room, hoping her favorite corner two-top would still remain unoccupied by the time she picked up her latte--meaning there’d be no young mothers, empty strollers askew, pale...

It would seem that on Christmas day my father pressed sweets on my mother, food at every meal, snacks when they took their coffee breaks or morning tea...

She’d come into our restaurant three times a week, on average. Like clockwork she came, in the late morning just after we opened. She’d pick up her fork...

We’ll trade more barbs
as we always do:
Get drunk and sulk ...

“Why didn't he come? I made his favourite meal for him,” thought Riya, wondering why her son had not yet arrived though he was supposed to come home today from...

Those who don’t pronounce the internal R are doomed to lose it forever: TuRmeric, people!...

Kann ya makan, fi gadim i-zaman—there was a time in the olden days... That’s the way stories used to start in the Middle East.

Some nights it feels I’m emptying a sea
into this file, a poemful at a time...

In Boston’s South End, two blocks up Mass. Ave. from Washington Street, the buildings widen into an oval of five-story brick townhouses. Built in the 1800s by merchants and sea captains, these buildings fell into ...

Dear Friends and fellow travelers,
I am presently in Ukraine to support and work with my neurosurgery friends and colleagues in Dnipro and then to ...

The name immediately springs to mind rationing and WWII, which is no doubt where my mother got the idea that milk powder was something economical. As a doctor, she required her four children to each drink three 8oz. glasses of milk every day...

The white pickup truck tore down the road. 12-year-old Tyler Wells rode in the passenger seat next to his father, John Wells. They rode with both windows down, Tyler's sandy blonde hair flapping.....

“Alexa, start my day.”
Everything at the tip of my voice....

She inhaled with a slurping sound, as only a European enjoys having a good smoke. Then she exhaled with laughter. Genevieve smiled at me, grasping for English words. She was French, a country girl - earthy and sophisticated....

Have you ever quickly fallen in love, jumped into living together, and soon realized that your new love had some issues...

A boatbuilder, son of Will Frost, who escaped debtors prison in Canada by moving to Maine, where he built some very fast boats during the Prohibition......

Dusk descended outside my second-floor Royal Phnom Penh Hotel room accompanied by what sounded like strings of distant firecrackers popping...

I watch his chest,
make sure he’s dead....

On the old boardwalk of Falmouth Harbor, a man in familiar clothing stops his bicycle. He arrives just before sunset, in serene glasses. Reaching into the bungee-corded milk crate in back, he pulls out.....

I grew up in a house where professional sports were not an obsession, but baseball held memories tied to that ancient idea of hitting an object with a stick as far as you could. One afternoon, my mother asked if I wanted to meet a famous anthropologist...

It’s always a traffic summer. I’m 14, sitting the wall, watching tourist TV. A man in an old Pontiac sees me, leans across his son. “Where to park?,” he says; big smile...

It was summer of 1974. I was eighteen and working for Eddie Jaskun at the Woods Hole Pharmacy. Eddie, or EJ as he was known, had a medium build, with thick dark hair on the sides of his balding head. He was a great businessman, a raconteur...

In the company of trees I fear nothing. I am free and independent like the uninhibited ocean. My conscious spirit is as pure as a lake reflecting the infinite sky on a summer day. Trees speak...

When a blizzard blows in,
I pull out your mint green blanket
With its giant squares and stars...

The pageantry of memory impales itself on night......

SETTING: A puppet stage depicting Verona or something like that.
TIME: The present.
PRODUCTION NOTES: The roles of RORO and CUTEY are to be played by the same actor wearing sock puppets on either hand.....

Mona hired 16-year-old Fazli, when Ali, the cook, said he was too old to care for our house alone. The house in Peshawar was where we lived while we worked in Pakistan. Within a month, Ali was dead, and it was just easier to let Fazli take over his duties.....

There was a house. It sits in sunken sand, swaying with the wind and tides. Gusts squeeze through drafts and imperfections, producing a howl. The kind of howl a wolf makes towards the moon. The house is blindfolded – thin, salt-crusted plywood shielding its windows to the world. The house has nothing to do but sit, waiting, wanting. ....

I pick up Dad first, or Grandpa Jerry, as Carmen calls him. He’s 94 and can remember many poems by heart as if standing in front of his senior English class. But short-term memory is going. I lean over...

Sally sells seashells....

<audibly breathe in for 1 second; breathe out for 2 seconds>
The Navy Seals practice a breathing technique to curtail the feeling of panic. It is simple: breathe out twice as long as you breathe in. I use this often....

The night before, he had a dream — at least, he thought it was a dream — where he crawled on all fours down to the end of his hospital bed, himself as he was now, an old man, gray and wasted in a sweat-soaked johnnie, but also a....