IS THE IMAGE REAL?
The image is as real as any I have known: vivid, sharp, and sure. The sun is very high and hot. I am running as fast as a runner may ever run. The images of crows and clouds preoccupy the very front of my mind. Suddenly, I am suspended. I am upside down. I take stock...
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THE SHADOW MAN
It is surpassing strange that reality is something that can be all of one thing in one moment, and be some entirely different thing in the next. Take for example the experience of sleep. We wrestle with problems, sometimes even solve them, and then awaken to sort...
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ANAGRAM INDIANS
I was trying to plan a fishing trip the other day, with my official state map of Oklahoma spread before me on the table. There were more than enough streams and lakes. But the more I studied the map, the more I got distracted by all the place names and the mystery...
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COWBOYS
Until he came to Oklahoma in 1970, Steve Przelomski had never seen a sunset. The first one he saw made an impression on him that his friends from the old neighborhood in Newark could not understand. Of the four young men who left New Jersey to attend St. Gregory’s...
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THE ZEN OF CLUTTER
A great fraud has been perpetrated on an unsuspecting West. We are supposed to believe that a person sitting in a Japanese sand garden or in an empty rice-paper room is enjoying a peaceful respite from the cares of life. Don’t be misled. The man in the silk...
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Things Go Away
However fond one may be of a memory, after a time the details fade. That is just what one expects to happen to a dream. But life is just the same way. The particulars, for some unknown reason, are misfiled by some careless clerk in an underpaid part of the...
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Gnome on the Range
On one hand you may trade or collect the little statues known as garden gnomes as kitsch - trashy but somehow cool objects that are not quite art. Pink flamingos are also both kitsch and cool. Hitler teddy bears are definitely kitsch but very uncool. Maybe your...
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Nights on the Ground
I suppose it must be what they call the soul that keeps memories in some secret place and in some particular order. Through the miracle of social media, I have been able say hello and a little more to my friend Jim. We worked, hiked, and talked our way across America,...
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Jennie and Her Lover
It can be facile to imagine a pioneer woman or a mountain man. There might even be some curious resemblance between one early settler and a popular stereotype. But one ought not to forget that each and every pioneer was some particular person who grew up with parents...
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The Whole Truth
It has been the dream of science for a long time to be able to solve a crime by discovering when a witness is lying or telling the truth. In an earlier and more innocent time, the eye witness was thought to be the gold standard of courtroom evidence. But there,...
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