"What’s dat stuff on your face, mistuh? What is it?" Mark Cahill tried to pretend he was asleep. But the high-pitched young voice was penetrating, and persistent. His day had been filled with an early departure and a long, rough connecting flight that included two even rougher landings. Now this. And LaGuardia was over an hour away. Still, he could recognize defeat. With a sigh, Mark opened his eyes and looked towards the...

She blew in like an aggravated F5 tornado, shouted, "Don't you dare say a thing,” slammed the door shut and slung her purse across the room. It ricocheted away from my bottom-weary couch, cleared off the end table, then teetered briefly at the edge before following the displaced debris onto the floor. Only the reading lamp survived, leaning drunkenly against the wall, shade tilted at a precarious angle, light flickering,...

Now, I'm not complaining, you understand, but these foreign dogs I’m living with are crazy. I call those house-hounds 'foreign' because one is part German Shepard, another is a mix of French poodle and something else, while the other is probably, more or less, Tibetan. The problem is whenever the French guy sees another dog or any other animal, either alive or animated, on TV, he begins barking and making like a love-stru...

The following meditation on the whoosification of modern baseball was sparked by a recent trip to a swanky, new, air-conditioned major league ballpark. Now don't get me wrong, all these ritzy new major league baseball parks are nice, I suppose, but playing baseball in the boondocks has a special ambiance all its own. Back during one of my inglorious days at old, Knotty Pine High School, the baseball team, everybody called...

We both want, an old-fashioned, wide-screen, Technicolor epic romance, a real Bogie and Bacall number. Instead, what we got that night was two old friends so smashed they started making out at a levee party.  "What in the world were you dreaming about, lady?" Amy Marshall opened her green eyes, pushed back her floppy straw hat, and looked up at Mark Cahill, her life-long friend, the man she’d just been dreaming about. "No...

In the summer of 1970, an engaged, Jewish, student nurse and a wounded Vietnam vet from the south met in a New York VA hospital. This chapter marks the end of the beginning of their story. Mark Cahill’s body tensed at the familiar, rhythmic click of Gwen Kaplan’s footsteps approached his room. Not for the first time, he flashed back to their fight the day before he left town to spend Christmas with his family. He still co...

Outside, a scattering of forlorn leaves clung to the dark, wet limbs of trees bordering the deserted playground and half-empty parking lot behind the red brick apartment building. Cold, misty rain and swirling winds hastened the inevitable outcome of this doomed struggle. For Gwen, watching from inside her snug bedroom, it was a beautiful scene. The nasty, late-December weather had given her a great excuse to spend the en...

They might be spending more money on dates and making love instead of making out, but some things, such as Johnny, never seemed to change.  The imperative, female voice boomed down the hallway. “Gwen, pick up the phone, already! It’s your friend Robin.” Gwen put down her nail polish and reached for the phone her father had installed in the bedroom she shared with her kid sister. “Hey, Robin. Where are you? Is everything a...

"Well, I've got good news and I've got bad news. Which do you want first?" Gwen had just walked into Mark's hospital room and was taking off her damp raincoat. "Since I'm still standing," she said, "give me the good news first." "I've wrangled a three day pass for this weekend," he announced with a triumphal grin. "That means I won't have to report back here until Monday morning. Do you think you can handle that situation...

The families of the three men all endured fear, anxiety, and heartache while their loved ones were in the service. On Veterans Day, America will recognize those who lost their lives after answering their country's call to duty in the armed services. Many people, including some who were in the military, have a problem deciding what constitutes a “real” vet. It isn't a simple designation. Various combinations of length, nat...

Minutes after her fiance’ stormed away, pouting over not getting his way during their time alone, she decided to test how a certain other man would act in a similar situation. Gwen Kaplan stood in the doorway of the familiar hospital room, studying the man who had so disrupted her once well-ordered life. Mark Cahill lay stretched out in bed with his eyes closed, using earphones to listen to a recording of, “A Farewell to...

She had two lovers: the fiance’ she’d loved for years and wanted to marry, and this new man, the one she couldn’t stop seeing... Gwen Kaplan sat in one of the small, doorless cubicles that lined the back wall of the lobby of her all-female dorm. It might be 1970, but these so-called ‘beau parlors were the only sanctioned spot for what the school conduct manual still referred to as, “entertaining gentleman callers.” As she...

It occurred to Mark Cahill that things could be one hell of a lot worse. He was out of his room at the nearby Manhattan veterans’ hospital, sitting in a coffee shop on Lexington Avenue and staring across the cluttered table of a two-person booth into the soft, brown eyes of a very attractive student nurse. At the moment, she seemed to be saying something about school. He’d nod at times, even mumble to show interest, while...

Note: This fictionalized memoir is based on the author’s personal experience. The names have been changed to protect the innocent and not-so-innocent. This was the longest time Mark had ever been apart from Gwen. There had been interesting women in his life since ’Nam. Some were old friends, others new, a few even intimate, but Gwen was special. Back when he’d been a kid, Mark Cahill’s mother often took him along when she...

"If only the good die young, that crew will live to a hundred.” This unflattering rumination came from one, William Jackson “Willie” Sinclair IV. The target of his jaundiced assessment was the Iota Fraternity test procurement committee. Its entire membership was currently passed out in a back room of the Iota house amid a sea of card, chips, and empty beer cans. What prompted Willie’s unkind assessment was their failure t...