Posts by Geraldine Birch
A Look Backward
Maybe it was my training as a newspaper reporter, or maybe because I had been raised by my family to watch my surroundings, but as I got out of my car, I noticed two men loitering around the men’s rest room. I made a fast track to the women’s bathroom and when I came out, one was still there, but the other had moved to the van.
Read MoreA Great Read!
When We Were Young and Brave by Hazel Gaynor is the kind of book that transports the reader to a a different time and place–a welcome change of scenery for those of us who are staying close to home during this pandemic. In this factual historical novel, the place is Chefoo, Shantung Province, China. and…
Read MoreThe Banyan Tree
Lahaina Town’s monstrous one-hundred-seventy-year-old banyan tree covers a whole block across from the harbor. One can sit on a bench under the tree’s spread and see the harbor twinkling through its branches, but it’s the banyan that commands the eye, not the water. The tree’s many trunks (16) reach deep into the island’s soil wherever…
Read MoreA Bag of Charcoal
There I stood, a beauty to behold in my worn pink chenille robe, my hair rolled up in curlers, and my eight months of pregnancy bulging beyond the robe’s width. That spring evening almost fifty years ago, I was exhausted, cranky, and ready to climb into bed with my already sleeping husband, when the doorbell…
Read MoreOn Deadline
Darkness enveloped the lone gas station that stood on a rural road surrounded by open fields. I slowed down to take a better look, but I knew I had no choice. This was the only place for miles where there would be a telephone booth. I was on deadline, having just left an important school…
Read MoreLove your Enemies per Leo Tolstoy (in the time of Coronavirus?)
It is a mistake to think that there are times when you can safely address a person without love. You can work with objects without love–cutting wood, baking bricks, making iron–but you cannot work with people without love. In the same way as you cannot work with bees without being cautious, you cannot work with…
Read MoreSilent Reason
She isn’t pretty. Her face is angular in an odd way reminding you of a triangle; her stomach swollen, stretched to its limit. She looks uncomfortable, ungainly even, yet she doesn’t seem inhibited by her pregnancy, climbing about as she does, nimbly moving from leaf to leaf. A few weeks ago, when you spied her…
Read MoreTheir Kind of Music
A short story By Geraldine Birch Oddballs littered the barroom: Old gents in double breasted suits and dames far beyond menopause dressed too fancy for six in the evening, while middle-aged women in business attire sipped cocktails with business associates or lovers. Younger dudes smelling of fish caught in the bay wore sloppy T-shirts and…
Read MoreHelpers vs. the Helped
During our lives, we help each other; sometimes we help other people, sometimes we are helped by others. But the world is formed so that usually some people mostly help others, and some mostly receive their help. As you acquire objects, and you use them, you should keep in mind that they are the product’s…
Read MoreA Note from Lisa See
To continue from my last blog: With the return address on the postcard from Lisa See announcing her newest novel, I realized I could return those postcards of old Los Angeles sent to me ten years ago by Lisa’s mother, Carolyn See. I had contacted Carolyn after reading her energizing book, “Making a Literary Life,”…
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