Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, I was playing in my garden last night, giving all the hedges around my house bad haircut.  If they are teenagers they'd swear to never talk to me again. I don't mind, cos people talk to me when I am out in my garden. Old folks.  Older folks.  Some I have seen before working on their own garden, others in their eyes I saw them looking at me seeing themselves once working on their own garden.  Sometimes they'd stop to talk, if our eyes met, if the beast in my hands wasn't roaring.  More often though they would just give me a big, approving grin, telling me, among many other things, to not take things for granted. Even my toil. I've finally got a chance to talk to the wife of my neighbor, the auto mechanic who suffered a big stroke .  She was walking her pit bull.  I've learned more about him in this 15-minutes conversation with his wife than with all the conversations I had with him over the years added together then times by tw...

Dear Eugene, The sun is brilliant today, best time of year, not too hot, not too cold, not too anything , a good life hangs finely in the balance of a myriad of capricious elements, mostly hidden, many I won't even come to identify let alone make sense of before my little life ends. Two mornings ago I read in the news that a suicide bomber attacked a voter registration center in Afghanistan, killing 31 people.  Yesterday morning the headline was gone, and I had to search online to see the casualty was then more than doubled. If I didn't quickly scan the headlines Sunday morning I would not even know something like this had happened, like the registering voters knew not a bomb was in their midst, and by the time they knew for sure there would be no point in knowing, let alone trying to make sense of the blast or piecing smithereens back together.  A line was drawn to divide before and after, life and death, hope and despair; a line that gives and takes away the meaning of...

Dear Eugene, I found out last week what I knew already, only I was expecting worse. My neighbor around the corner is a retired auto mechanic.  He walks his pit bull everyday, and for more than a few years since I moved here I would wave him a Hi from across the street while Sumi gives her usual panic bark that necessitates my tug on her leash as a token apology to shroud my habitual embarrassment.  His pit bull is too old to even sport a scorn. Cars would go in and out of his driveway pretty much all year round.  Two summers ago I walked up his driveway with Sumi and asked if I could have him for more than a neighbor; he said he would be honored to keep my car healthy.  Ms. Pit Bull, unleashed as always, lay low next to her boss, who emerged from the shadow of a car's belly, relishing the smell of napalm in the morning.  By then Sumi, loony as she is, have at last realized she is no more than a piece of dead meat to Big Missy and would reciprocate the ...