Jay Wrote

I looked at his painting and snickered.  His women looked like sullen wax candles melted weeks ago because they stood too close to the hearth.  He could not afford the slow constant heat of good coal, even though we were in the coal fields where Zola had researched Germinal .  Every night as the sun disappeared I scavenged behind the coal wagons that hauled the miners’ piles to the rail spur.  But last night, a pair of armed constables chased me off, one hollering “Van Gogh, if I catch you, you’ll wish you’d never come to visit your failed-preacher brother.”   The coal hopper was empty as we finished the bread and wormy apples that was our dinner.  He went to the vestry and gathered a pile of dusty hymnals and discarded bibles in his arms and returned to the cottage.  Once Genesis and Exodus were sacrificed, Vincent threw whole volumes onto the grate.  The flames leapt high, pages like orange-rimmed black leaves scattered onto the scarred woo...

  Clouds Followed His Every Move       All around him, there are spies. Some of them are detached observers, like glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others, again (running water, storms), are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him, and grotesquely misinterpret his actions.     Nabokov, Symbols and Signs In 1980 my brother moved from Vermont to live with us in St. Paul after a falling out with co-workers. David believed they were drug dealers and plotting to harm him. Six weeks later he was on the street under hot summer skies. I put him there. He was twenty four years old. He could have become one of the lost chronic homeless, like Sam, my friend's brother, who sank into the muck of life on the street and disappeared.  David’s childhood was hard. He was born with developmental troubles. He may have been hit by a flu virus during gestation. No...