The Re-Con
Ich bin: being German in post-WWII America
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Swastikas that Jimmy Clarken and other kids drew on their notebook covers no longer seemed like innocent doodles or attempts at teenage rebellion
The Re-Con
The Water Way: out of its banks in summer, the Susquehanna rises
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In winter, ice floes and the clear sense I’ve put myself in the way of the world
The Re-Con
What Would It Take?
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“It’s the question I’ve recently asked myself, one that most of us ignore because we can’t imagine that it actually concerns us.”
The Re-Con
A year in the gutter: that thin straight canyon where one page meets the next
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Knowing is better than not knowing, so I read
The Re-Con
How to prepare for a testy election
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Manifestations of voter suppression are red hued and many
The Re-Con
Departures: a family history memorialized on the four faces of a cemetery stone
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It tilts north, a departure from all the other upright German stones around it.
The Re-Con
The etymology of home
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“Dozens of fireflies glittered like streetlights twinkling in a distant city whose name I didn’t yet know…”
The Re-Con
The Country Corporeal
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“…we stood on the edge of a field where, on a September morning in 1862, the blood of 12,000 men — wounded and dead — soaked the soil. “
The Re-Con
The Demonstration: heart thumping, ears ringing — the pistol’s report took us to a hilltop in Vietnam
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45 years later the gunshot called up the echo of Kent State, My Lai, Tet, Walter Cronkite, Saigon, Berkeley, Bobby Kennedy, Woodstock, Nixon, Weathermen, Memphis, Martin Luther King Jr.
The Re-Con
Whence Cometh the Icemen?
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“How long before someone and then someone else steps over that line, crosses the gates and barriers, and strikes the fatal blows against the source of the stench skulking out of the east and drags it across the gutter and off into history?”