fiction and musings from a gay black dude with delusions above his station
A megathrust earthquake struck on June 22, 1996. Mom died. So powerful an event, I knew it had happened without solid confirmation. The nurses kindly said that there had been no change in my mother’s condition, though the pauses in their speech told me what they did not want to say. Later that morning, I…
After Mom died, I couldn’t listen to Brahms for about four years. Truth be told, all classical music remained highly problematic. For whatever reason, though, Brahms topped the don’t touch list, the trigger-warning list. I can recall a conversation between my mom, one of my brothers, and me, rhapsodizing about the music we loved. Brahms…
Our band will never sound the same again. – Duke Ellington, after the passing of Johnny Hodges Not a minute of this Thanksgiving will go by without my thoughts turning time and again on my brother Robert. This will be the first Thanksgiving since his passing. To be sure, we did not gather last year,…
