by sumac | Oct 30, 2015 | Personal Apologies, The Mechanics of Apology
Columbus Circle station, early summer, bench. Young black guy, cool hipsterish clothes, large backpack, amusingly be-patched (does he really belong to Lehigh Valley Police Revolver League?), subtly spray-painted (faint black shading on light khaki), iPod, iPhone....
by sumac | Oct 14, 2015 | Personal Apologies
Middle of the night, there you are in an Antarctic gale, thirty feet above the deck of your sailboat, mast swinging wildly, trying to attach a new halyard because the previous one snapped off. Probably because the only other person on the sailboat, who came on as crew...
by snarly | Sep 21, 2015 | Personal Apologies, Religious Apologies, Youth apologizes
Over at Tablet Magazine (where Snarly is a columnist) there is a delightful comic about all the different apologies the artist owes for long-ago incidents. It’s funny and also sad. Read the whole thing here. I also loved this story, which reads almost like a...
by sumac | Aug 7, 2015 | Personal Apologies, Youth apologizes
In The Hollow Land, by Jane Gardam, an apology plays a foundational role. So much happens in this book, and this happens right at the start, so I don’t feel bad telling you most of this part. In Cumbria, in the farming and grazing country called the Hollow Land...
by sumac | Jun 1, 2015 | Personal Apologies, Political Apologies
A public high school in Cranston, Rhode Island, had a big banner hanging in the auditorium, with an official school prayer on it. The school’s first class (1959) had been told to create it. The prayer would have been uncontroversial and unexciting (“Help us to...
by snarly | Mar 8, 2015 | Artistic apologies, Personal Apologies
And now they’re dead. No, wait, the apology did not cause death. Because they could not stop for death, but it kindly stopped for them anyway! As it is wont to do. The poetess was Emily Dickinson, neurasthenic homebody and possibly agoraphobic verse-slinger; the...
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