Teak haiku

Dreaming fully awake

Paean to my Parents

2 First-Graders on a street corner
My 6-year-old son, Teak, was walking with my wife and came across a school friend, Ella, on the corner of 84th and Amsterdam. Ella is in front of him and turns around with a smile. Ella: “Teak, you are so weird!” She faced ahead once more. My wife Karen’s thought-cloud: Uh, oh. What did he do now? Ella, [...]

Bennett’s First Birthday [Conclusion]
The raindrops pattered onto the clear plastic cupcake containers and sounded like tiny timpani. Though partially protected at the bottom of the two bags, the rhythmic drumbeat augmented my steps, moving up Columbus Avenue and around 83rd Street, heading west. Fifty feet to my left, the red painted façade of Engine Company 74 glistened with silver [...]

[Interlude] Deep Joy, Sorrow and Hope
The Christian will express deep joy, deep sorrow, and deep hope. Deep joy is laughter in the face of imminent death. Each of us will die, either in a moment from now or in decades, but die we will. And because the Christian knows that this transition leads only to a new and unending [...]

Bennett’s First Birthday [Part 2]
After floating in the Guadalupe River near Hunt, Texas, looking for arrowheads at the bottom of the shallow water, and while eating burgers at Fuddrucker’s in Kerrville, my three sons were to return to their city of eight million in less than a week. We live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where in our zip code [...]

Bennett’s First Birthday [Part 1]
The Cowboy Store in Kerrville is gone. Karen had agreed to accompany me on my search for a pearl snap shirt, a semi-annual ritual during our summer and Christmas vacations to Kerrville, her hometown, from New York City, mine, and where we live now. I became somewhat taken with this style of shirt upon seeing it worn [...]